The international office at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has revealed that it is struggling to secure housing for over 150 international and exchange students who are due to start their studies this August.
It is a problem shared by the American Field Service (AFS), a leading student placement organisation, which has seen a drop in the number of host families participating in its student exchange programme.
In a press release drawing attention to its problem, CBS yesterday revealed that the number of rooms it has found is 60 percent down on this time last year.
The crisis will not only affect international CBS students, explained Tom Dahl-Østergaard, the director of the CBS international office, but also Danish students hoping to study abroad.
“The exchange ratio is 1:1,” he said in the press release. “So the less exchange students Copenhagen and Frederiksberg are able to accommodate, the less CBS students we will be able to send out into the world.”
AFS is also having difficulty finding host families for its students, who are primarily upper secondary age students. AFS, a non-profit organisation with a presence in around 50 countries around the world, arranges for students to live with a foreign host family over the duration of their studies.
“[Host families] get a great experience and they get to know another culture, often [putting] a new perspective on their own lives,” Amanda Olsen, the hosting and support co-ordinator of AFS Interkultur Denmark, told The Copenhagen Post.
The scarcity of host families and room rentals has both AFS and CBS worried.
“This situation is critical and CBS is at risk of destroying an impressive track record by not being able to find enough accommodation for exchange students for the first time ever,” said Dahl-Østergaard.
Reaching out to the residents of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, Dahl-Østergaard asked for anyone with an available room to rent it to a student.
To find out more about renting a room to an international student, contact the international office at CBS at 3815 3054 or privatehousing.intoff@cbs.dk; or the American Field Service at 38343300 or afs.interkultur@afs.org.
