14-year-old gets an early taste of college

SALISBURY, Md. — Josh Bentley looks every bit the college student — floppy blond hair sticking out from under a baseball cap, gray T-shirt and jeans with a cell phone clipped in the pocket.

But Josh is nervous about a reporter and photographer following him to class. A media entourage would be a sure tip-off something’s unusual about the sophomore biology major.

“They don’t know I’m 14,” he said.

Josh’s classmates at Salisbury University don’t know that his parents pick him up at the end of the school day, or that he is the youngest student on campus.

He is not the youngest ever to enroll at Salisbury — the university graduated a 14-year-old student in 1996 — and except for a sprinkling of acne, you would never know Josh wasn’t the same age as his classmates.

“It’s no big deal,” Josh said, shrugging off being a decade younger than some undergraduates.

His sprint through school began a long time ago. He didn’t even attend kindergarten, starting school in first grade.

He was home-schooled for a while, then took the ACT in seventh grade, when he was 12.

Josh scored a 28 — an above-average score for a high school senior — then split his time between a Missouri high school and courses at Missouri Southern State University, near his parents’ house.

When his dad’s job brought the family to Berlin, Md., Josh’s mother, Maryne Bentley, asked Salisbury University if Josh could attend. Josh, her oldest of two sons, was always very bright, she said.

Mrs. Bentley remembers story time when Josh was a toddler and attempting a tired parent’s trick of skipping a few paragraphs or pages to get to the end of the story.

“He’d tell me, ‘Mom, you missed that part,’” she recalled. “He was reading at 3 years old.”

But the decision to put him in college full time wasn’t easy, she said.

“It was very hard because you want them to be a kid and you don’t want them to miss out on senior prom and playing football,” she said.

University advisers at first weren’t sure about admitting Josh, said Laura Thorpe, Salisbury’s director of admissions.

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