HCCC will recognize graduates who completed or will complete their degree requirements during the Summer II 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Summer I 2025, and Summer II 2025 terms.
Valedictorian Lidia Khayrulina will address her classmates, their families, the HCCC Board of Trustees, faculty, and other honored guests at the ceremony. A first-generation Russian immigrant, Lidia put aside her fear of failing, mastered English as her second language, and focused on attaining her Associate of Science degree in Business Administration. She is an HCCC Foundation Scholar, a 2025 Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Transfer Scholarship Semi-Finalist, and a New Jersey Council of County Colleges “New Jersey Student of the Year” nominee. Lidia is lauded for her academic achievement, character, perseverance, leadership, inspirational success, and community service. She was a project-based marketing intern at the non-profit We Care Movement, and excelled in supplemental business trainings, competitions, conventions, special events, and other activities and clubs.
Additional details about the ceremony and the graduates are forthcoming.
About Hudson County Community College
Hudson County Community College serves more than 20,000 credit and non-credit students annually. The College offers over 90 degree and certificate programs, including award-winning English as a Second Language; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); Culinary Arts/Hospitality Management, Nursing and Health Professions, and Humanities and Social Sciences. The HCCC Culinary/Hospitality Management program was ranked number six in the U.S. by Best Choice Schools. The College’s School of Continuing Education and Workforce Development offers cutting-edge, industry-recognized, stackable credentials in alignment with high-priority workforce needs.
HCCC has partnerships with major four-year colleges and universities in the greater New Jersey-New York area and beyond, accommodating seamless transfer of credits for further undergraduate and graduate education.
The College has received dozens of national awards throughout the years. In 2023, HCCC received the Outstanding Member Institution Award from the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). HCCC was a finalist in seven categories of last year’s American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) national “Awards of Excellence” and earned the 2024 CEO of the Year, Faculty of the Year, and Student Success Awards.
For the third consecutive year, HCCC was selected as one of 18 community colleges in the United States to be named among the “2024 Most Promising Places to Work in Community Colleges” by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD). HCCC was one of 22 community colleges in the nation, and the only college in New Jersey, to be recognized by ModernThink LLC and the “Chronicle of Higher Education” as a 2024, 2023 and 2022 “Great College to Work For®” and named to the 2024 and 2023 “Honor Roll of Distinction.”
HCCC is one of two colleges in the United States to be named a Top Ten Finalist in all three program categories for the nationally recognized 2023 Bellwether Awards, and received the 2023 Bellwether Award for the College’s cutting-edge “Hudson Scholars” program, which also won the 2024 Bellwether Legacy Award.
The College’s exemplary work in advancing student success has been recognized with the 2025, 2024, and 2023 “Leader College of Distinction” designation by Achieving the Dream, the national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing community colleges as catalysts for equity and mobility in their communities. HCCC was also presented the Campus Prevention Network Seal of Prevention in 2024 and 2023 for demonstrating leadership in digital prevention programming focused on student safety, well-being, and inclusion.
