Brown and White Vol. 129 no. 5

              The Brown and White Vol. 129 No. 5
Friday, September 18, 2015 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Since 1983,
U.S. News &
World Report
has annually
released
its high-ly-
an-
Following the resignation of
Mohamed El-Aasser last February,
Patrick Farrell, Lehigh’s provost
and vice president for Academic
Affairs, began the search to find a
new vice president for the Office of
International Affairs.
The Office of International Affairs
is intended to integrate and expand
the Lehigh community with inter-national
academic institutions in an
effort to transform into a more glob-ally-
minded university.
Gary Sasso, the dean of the College
of Education, is the head chairper-son
for the search committee. The
committee is comprised of 37 mem-bers
– including university trustees,
deans, professors, two undergraduate
students and one graduate student –
Website design, concierge and
in-home tech support are just some
of the features of Lehigh Valley
Tech Support, a student start-up
that aims to service Lehigh Valley
residents.
Founder Matt Rothberg, ’18,
came up with the name “concierge
tech” to define the personalized
nature of his business.
“Each client will get their own
specialist that they can keep in
touch with,” he said. “It’s similar to
private banking. You can go to the
bank and talk to a different person
every time. They don’t really know
your issue and you explain it every
time.
“What this is, is someone who has
worked with you in the past, they
know your issues and how your
computer works. So it’s really very
personalized.”
Rothberg believes concierge tech
will fill a void in current technology
support.
The concierge service will be a
monthly fee, and the customers will
have their own personal concierge
assigned to them. The phone num-ber,
email, and other contact infor-mation
are given to the customer
so that they can call the concierge
directly when in need of assistance.
Rothberg said the in-home
service that Lehigh Valley Tech
Support offers is inspired by a suc-cessful
tech company, HelloTech, in
California.
“They don’t have concierge sup-port,”
Rothberg said. “They just
have an in-home area where a (col-lege)
student will just come and
fix your stuff. As soon as they
launched, people loved the idea.
They got almost $5 million in fund-ing
because of how big of a market
people think there is for this.”
Rothberg’s team consists of six
people, and he hopes to attract new
students to work for the start-up.
Lehigh’s excellent engineering and
computer science programs can be
a great place to draw talented stu-dents
from, he said.
Anna Malisova, ’18, head of con-cierge
support, noted that the com-pany
is trying to bridge the gap
between the Bethlehem community
and Lehigh. Lehigh Valley Tech
Support’s outreach to all of the
Lehigh Valley, not just the univer-sity.
Malisova said the company
plans to hand out fliers at the mall
and get published in local news
outlets to expand its reach to the
community.
“Rothberg had a separate compa-ny
back home,” she said. “He has a
lot of contacts from there because
he really built up respect and a
good brand there.
“We’re still trying to grow a cli-ent
base here, and we figure that
maybe students will use it, maybe
people in the Bethlehem area that
have trouble with any sort of tech-nology
or setting stuff up.”
Lehigh Valley Tech Support
plans to open operations in the
next month or two. In the mean-time,
they are offering university
ticipated list of college rankings.
For better or for worse, these
rankings — which include cate-gories
such as national universi-ties,
national liberal arts colleges,
regional universities, and region-al
colleges among others — often
play an important role in deter-mining
where high school seniors
decide to submit their admission
deposits.
In the 2016 U.S. News edition
of national universities, released
Sept. 9, Lehigh was ranked No.
47 — dropping seven places from
the 2015 ranking at No. 40.
For its national universities
list — including Lehigh —
U.S. News takes into consid-eration
undergraduate aca-demic
reputation for 22.5
percent of its weight-ing,
graduation and
retention rates for
22.5 percent, fac-ulty
resources
for the pre-vious
aca-demic
year
for 20 per-cent,
student selectivity for the
previous entering class for 12.5
percent, financial resources for 10
percent, graduation rate perfor-mance
for 7.5 percent and alumni
giving for 5 percent.
Universities across the coun-try
send their statistics to the
Common Data Set, a detailed
report covering university-wide
information. The purpose of the
report is to provide precise, time-ly
and transparent data to stu-dents
and families. The data is
then compiled and used by a vari-ety
of publications and institu-tions,
including U.S. News, for an
assortment of reasons.
However, there is much more
to schools than can be quantified
and compiled into a list.
“We see rankings, such as those
by U.S. News & World Report,
to be one of several tools avail-able
for students who are evalu-ating
a variety of colleges,” said
Lori Friedman, interim director
of media relations in the Office
of Communications and Public
Affairs. “We ask that prospec-tive
students and their fami-lies
seek the right college for
their personal goals and needs
with a more comprehensive
approach — making a personal
Falling out of favor
Lehigh loses seven places in US News rankings
By RAPHAEL KHALLOUQI
B&W Staff
Office of
International
Affairs seeks
VP candidate
By LAURYN RAGONE
Assistant News Editor
Students launch ‘concierge tech’ business
By ABBY McBRIDE
B&W Staff
Lehigh Valley Tech Support
was created by Matt
Rothberg, ’18, to service the
Bethlehem community’s
technology needs
See TECH Page 4 See CANDIDATES Page 4
See US NEWS Page 4
Ahead
of Lehigh
in the 2016
U.S. News
college rankings
are Boston University,
Tulane University, Penn
State University and the
University of Connecticut.
Liz Cornell/B&W Staff