Need to use Unreal for school, can this laptop run it and unreal editor?

It would run it yes, but with only 8 GB RAM it would likely choke on large projects (or even not so large ones potentially, if the asset quality is high).

I was able to get my game to build on my Son’s Windows laptop (i5, 8GB RAM, GTX 1650), but that game is very light on assets. I will try loading some other projects on it this evening and post again, but I suspect it will fall over and think you probably want to look for something with more memory.