Before deciding which doctoral astrophysics programme to apply for, Nick Lee perused the published rankings. He found a grab bag of results. The US News & World Report's numbers offered little substantive insight about the institutions he was interested in. The statistics from the US National Research Council (NRC) were updated too infrequently to help him. And the Times Higher Education World University Rankings offered data about the best universities for natural sciences, but not specifically PhD programmes in astronomy. Lee was left confused.
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