Adela Feranecová,

University of Economics in Bratislava, Košice, Slovakia,

 adela.feranecova@euke.sk

MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF UNIVERSITIES THROUGH CLUSTER ANALYSIS AND THE USE OF FINANCIAL RATIO INDEXES

Andrea Krigovská,

University of Economics in Bratislava,Košice, Slovakia,

andrea.krigovska@euke.sk

Abstract.Universities compete with each other for prestige, students, or significant global position in research and development. A comparison of the quality and performance of universities is carried out in the countries as a national comparison and then the international comparison of universities is made. Every single university excels at a  different area, which  can be a  science and research, high level of educational activities and so on. That is why it is important to evaluate universities together as a whole according to pre-defined evaluation criteria, respectively indicators of quality and performance. Important role in the evaluation of higher education also plays a ranking of universities. In our research, we use data derived from one of the world’s top rankings of universities – QS World University Rankings. Sixty-seven world universities are object of our research. Input data are financial statements, including balance sheets and profit and loss accounts of selected universities for the period 2010 – 2014. Using statistical software SPSS we will first get correlation matrix, and then carry out a factor analysis and cluster analysis. Using cluster analysis, we classify the universities located in different financial situations into subsets with similar characteristics to form groups of universities with similar financial situation. The results of cluster analysis compared with the ranking of universities will show if the financial situation of individual universities is consistent with the placement in the ranking of universities based on the ranking criteria.

Received: April, 2016

1st Revision: October, 2016

Accepted: November, 2016

DOI: 10.14254/2071-789X.2016/9-4/16

JEL Classification: I21, I22

Keywords: factor analysis, cluster analysis, quality, ranking,universities, performance.