Classification of higher education institutions (HEIs) of a country allows viewing higher education as a differentiated system which respects the diversity of purposes and aspirations of different HEIs. Classification is fundamentally different from ranking, which aims to rank universities in order with higher ranked HEIs being "better"…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…