By on December 30th, 2015

Your Options for Placing Groups of Students

If you’re working on figuring out where to place a group of international students for a stay in the United States, you might be concerned about over-populated dormitories, expensive apartment rentals, and/or how to find host families for the whole group. When you work with USH, you’ll actually have a couple of options for your group, and you won’t have to worry about finding housing for everyone – that’s our job.

For example, last year we placed a group of 12 students from China with the Educatius group in homestays with shared rooms. The students were able to get the homestay experience of living with host families, but they also had the comfort of sharing rooms with their fellow students who had similar routines and who spoke their language, too.

When it comes to placing your group, you can choose to go with furnished apartments, and you may be able to place them in a block of apartments adjacent to one another or at least in the same building, where they can hang out and get together for communal activities easily. This has its advantages, especially if you have students carpooling to class and other activities, but it doesn’t give them quite the same experience that a homestay would.

Your other option is to place everyone in separate or shared homestays. For group homestays, we do not have the same minimum stay that we have for individuals, so you have a little bit more flexibility. We recently placed seven officials from the Japanese Consulate Group with host families for their 10-day stay to attend the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco.

With larger groups, we do need to screen and approve more host families, but we know that this experience can be incredibly helpful and fulfilling for students and other international groups traveling to the US. For this reason, we partner with a large number of host families, and we maintain a number of move-in ready, fully furnished apartments, as well.

Whether you’re traveling with a large or small group, if your students will be staying in the US for a few days, weeks, or months, you can get everyone placed in either comfortable apartments or homestays with ease, thanks to USH. Contact us today to learn more about your options for placing your students near the college or university where they’ll be studying.