There are several well-known rankings of universities and higher education systems.
Numerous recent studies question whether it is possible to compare universities and
countries of different constitutions. These criticisms stand on solid ground. It is
impossible to create a one-dimensional ordering that faithfully compares complex systems
such as universities or even higher education systems. We would like to convince the
reader that using well-chosen elements of a family of state-of-the-art data mining
methods, namely, bi-clustering methods, can provide an informative picture of the
relative positions of universities/higher education systems. Bi-clustering methods
produce leagues of comparable entities alongside the indicators, which produce a similar
grouping of them. Within leagues, partial rankings could be specified and furthermore
can serve as a proper basis for benchmarking.
