As a former host family, I had a deeply challenging experience with Youth For Understanding (YFU). While the program promotes cultural exchange, its handling of student vetting, academic preparedness, and support for host families and schools raised serious concerns.
Issues with Admissions and Language Proficiency Testing
The student hosted under YFU’s program demonstrated significant academic and language deficiencies that were overlooked during the admissions process:
The student admitted to multiple failed attempts on the required English proficiency test before receiving an inflated score with alleged assistance.
After repeated concerns, YFU retested the student, but the process lacked impartiality, as the test was conducted by a teacher directly involved with the student. Despite three months of English immersion, the student only barely passed. YFU refused to provide the numerical score or clarity on passing standards.
Impact on Schools and Host Families
The student’s lack of preparedness created significant burdens:
School Resources: The student required extensive ESL support, remedial courses, and interventionist assistance. Teachers lowered standards, granting full credit for incomplete or incorrect work.
Host Family Challenges: YFU dismissed concerns about the strain on our family, repeatedly suggesting our expectations were too high. We were told other families might "show more compassion," despite the student’s lack of effort or academic progress.
Broken Agreements and Manipulation
To minimize disruption, we offered to continue hosting the student for the semester if YFU and the biological parents agreed not to place her with another family. While YFU initially agreed, they reneged, pressuring the school to find a new host family. This shifted the burden further onto already strained resources.
Conclusion
YFU’s systemic failures in vetting, testing oversight, and family support undermine the integrity of its program. Until meaningful reforms are implemented, including transparent admissions processes and improved support for schools and host families, I cannot recommend participation in this program.
My family's experience with YFU as a host to an exchange student is summarized below as a warning to others to avoid this organization; whose actions are far from professed values and whose ethics lack integrity.
Attempts at a responsible reconciliation through YFU president and board chair were stone walled. The racist comments by their local staff, recorded on tape, was never addressed, and the staff remained stealthily in charge of the student.
Our experience was that YFU was eager to place students but their Midwest region also had a predetermined opinion of an "American family" which in the Midwest, excluded families like my biracial family where a black naturalized woman is married to a white man. YFU's local district intereacted with us as if we were under an investigation and that they were social workers. They repeatedly attempted to poison the exchange student against our family to find non-existent issues. Thank goodness we had a great student. It was clear from every false allegation directed only at my wife, that Midwest YFU lacked the cultural wherewithal they needed to coordinate the simplest of all exchange programs. If the national office addressed this correctly, all would have been well, but YFU's leadership failed to lead ethically in this matter. Shame.
Review from Guidestar