Fuzzy cluster analysis on Spanish public universities

The present study tries to provide an alternative approach to the analysis of universities, by grouping Spanish public universities for the academic year 2006, into clusters that are statistically similar across all criteria, without making assumptions about the relative importance of each criterion. In (non fuzzy) clustering techniques, universities grouped according to particular performance. However, the same university could be important from more than one perspective at the same time, and to different degrees. Thus, in our view, a fuzzy clustering approach is more applicable. The results of the present analysis provide information on the situations of each Spanish public university within a national context.