Thuy Thi Nguyen was named the next president of Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. The community college, located east of San Jose, enrolls more than 15,000 students with women making up just under one half of the student body.
Nguyen currently serves as general counsel for the chancellor’s office of California Community Colleges. Earlier, she was general counsel for the Peralta Community College District in California. When she takes office at Foothill College, Nguyen will be the first Vietnamese American to lead a community college in California.
Nguyen and her family fled Vietnam after the end of the war, drifting on a boat in the Pacific Ocean for two weeks before being rescued by a commercial ship. The family relocated to Wichita, Kansas, and later to Oakland, California. She earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Yale University and a juris doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles.