Ten-year-old Zora Elling is an avid reader who enjoys taking care of the family chickens, solving puzzles and convincing her family to join her in adopting a vegetarian lifestyle.
She’s also about to become an Irvine Valley College alumna — the youngest in school history, in fact. She’s slated to graduate from the community college on Thursday, May 22, with an associate’s degree in science for transfer in mathematics.
And she’s breaking the record set last year by an older sister, Athena. And Athena, who graduated at 11 years and five months, beat the record set by their oldest brother, Tycho, who was a few days shy of his 12th birthday when he graduated from IVC in 2023.
The youngest Elling took various classes at IVC, including biology, calculus, U.S. history, psychology and writing, with a focus on math. At the same time, she attended homeschooling programs.
She also took other math courses at UC Irvine last summer and, prior to IVC, she took a few high school classes through the Independent Study program at Brigham Young University.
There weren’t any other 10-year-olds in her IVC classes, she said. Still, she wasn’t nervous to be surrounded by students who were a few years, or decades, older.
Mom Christina Chow said her youngest daughter has followed her siblings in many ways — in taekwondo and in setting youngest-grad records at IVC, for example. But the younger Elling is forging her own path, too, with interests that Chow said are “uniquely Zora.” These include vegetarianism, an aversion to plastic drinking straws, and the care and feeding of guinea pigs.
Chow, who described Zora as both quiet and resilient, added this: If she wants to do something, she will.
“As parents, you always just try to figure out what it is they like and support them. For Zora, it’s always been pets and reading and math,” Chow said.
All three Elling siblings were able to take classes at IVC as pre-teens because the school is an open-access community college. That means students who have parental consent (and, usually, a recommendation from a high school principal) can attend classes at IVC even before they’ve graduated from high school.
Over the past year, about 3,800 K-12 students attended classes at IVC, and 32 have RSVP’d to the school’s commencement, according to Vinh Nguyen, IVC’s interim director of dual enrollment.
Still, the rush isn’t for everybody.
“Even though college is great, we don’t want to harm students if they’re not properly prepared,” Nguyen said.
But once enrolled, IVC’s resources are available to all students, even if they are in the dual enrollment track. That includes access to the school’s library and to counseling and health services.
Nguyen said Zora Elling’s graduation, at age 10, is particularly remarkable because not every class is available to a K-12 student. Restrictions can come up because some classes include topics that aren’t appropriate for a pre-teen; a film studies class, for example, might include adult content. Also, Nguyen said, full-time, older students get higher priority for class registration.
“Because she finished so many classes, that means she’s tried to identify the classes, and when certain instructors say, ‘No, this one isn’t appropriate for you,’ she goes to a different one,” said Nguyen.
“The hurdles she’s overcome, accomplishing what she did, is pretty amazing.”
If at any point, college life is no longer enjoyable for Zora Elling, she can stop and go back to a charter school or homeschooling, said Chow.
But for now, she’ll continue to take courses at IVC over the summer, according to the college.
And, in the fall, she’ll continue her studies at UCI as a junior transfer. She plans to major in math. That means she’ll be attending a four year university without ever graduating from high school.
