  University evaluation is a topic of increasing concern in Italy as well as in
other countries. In empirical analysis, university activities and performances
are generally measured by means of indicator variables, summarizing the
available information under different perspectives. In this paper, we argue
that the evaluation process is a complex issue that can not be addressed by a
simple descriptive approach and thus association between indicators and
similarities among the observed universities should be accounted for.
Particularly, we examine faculty-level data collected from different sources,
covering 55 Italian Economics faculties in the academic year 2009/2010. Making
use of a clustering framework, we introduce a biclustering model that accounts
for both homogeneity/heterogeneity among faculties and correlations between
indicators. Our results show that there are two substantial different
performances between universities which can be strictly related to the nature
of the institutions, namely the Private and Public profiles . Each of the two
groups has its own peculiar features and its own group-specific list of
priorities, strengths and weaknesses. Thus, we suggest that caution should be
used in interpreting standard university rankings as they generally do not
account for the complex structure of the data.
