IntroductionThe quality and performance of universities worldwide is nowadays increasingly discussed topic. Undoubtedly is related to the inclusion of individual national universities into international higher education space, and thus the comparison between universities worldwide. Universities compete with each other for prestige, students, or significant 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. Performance of universities can not be assessed and evaluated partially, for example only via evaluation of faculties, departments, area of education, science and research, international openness, or prestige. 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 is important to evaluate each university 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, which was used in our article to evaluate the quality of universities. The problem was discussed in research study of Jarocka (2012), who used cluster analysis and one another ranking - Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). He made the classifications of universities by means of one of the method of cluster analysis called k-means clustering. As the result of using k-means procedure five different clusters were singled out and three different classifications were made. A classification according to:1. all criteria of ARWU ranking,2. quality of faculty and3. research output.According to the results of conducted classifications, different criteria of clustering give different group of universities, so the stakeholders can decide which criteria of evaluation are the most important for them and can compare similar institutions in terms of specific purposes. In our study we also use k-means clustering - four different clusters were singled out - but only one classification according to the criteria of QS World University Rankings.The aim of this analysis is to compare results of cluster analysis using financial and ratio indicators with the results of the world rankings and find out, if these results correspond.1.Literature reviewThe quality of higher education is very difficult to define and delimit. Vroeijenstijn (1991) believes that it is a waste of time to define quality precisely. Despite this opinion, several authors attempted to define quality of higher education. As stated by Schindler et al. (2015), there are a number of significant challenges to defining quality. First, quality is an elusive concept and there are many interpretations depending upon the views of different stakeholders. Stakeholders can be divided into four groups that must be taken into account when defining quality:1. providers - taxpayers,2. users of products - students,3. users of outputs - employers,4. employees of the sector - academics and administrators.Each group of stakeholders has a different view of the quality. Therefore, in order to define quality and establish a culture of quality in higher education, all stakeholders should be involved and engaged in the discussion to ensure the diversity of opinions and different perspectives (Bobby, 2014).A second challenge is that quality is a multidimensional concept, and that is why reducing a concept to one-sentence definition is problematic (Green, 1994). A third challenge is that quality is not a static, but rather dynamic and ever-changing pursuit of perfection that must be assessed in the context of a larger educational, economic, political or social perspective (Bobby, 2014).In terms of defining quality there are two strategies presented. …