Harvard Educators Criticize Report on American Colleges

A new government-sponsored report on American higher education has met with sharp criticism from Harvard professors.

The report, entitled "Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education," cited a decline in the quality of education received by college graduates and made 27 recommendations to remedy the situation.

While most professors interviewed agreed with the problems identified by the report, which was commissioned in 1983 by the National Institute of Education, they rejected its proposed solutions.

The panel called on universities and colleges to establish minimum standards and to test students in both their fields of concentration and in general knowledge.

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"Schools should spend more time on what [students] should get out of college instead of how to get in," said Kenneth P. Mortimer, chairman of the panel and a professor of higher education and public administration at Pennsylvania State University.

But experts her questioned the necessity and feasibility of such a program.

The report cited several signs it concluded indicate a decline in the quality of higher education, including a decrease in scores in 10 of 14 major subject areas in the Graduate Record Examination from 1964 to 1982.

"The strains of rapid expansion, followed by recent years of constricting resources and leveling enrollments, have taken their toll," the report stated.

The report also decrled the increasing pre-professionalism in the nation's colleges and universities. According to the panel, the percentage of bachelor's degrees granted in the arts and sciences, as opposed to those from professional, preprofessional and vocational programs, fell from 49 percent in 1971 to 36 percent in 1982.

Among the panel's other recommendations:

* increasing emphasis on leaching and advising college freshmen and sophomores.

* establishing a minimum of two years of liberal arts courses for all students.

* de-emphasizing vocational courses and

* decreasing the number of part-time professors.

Report Reception

Harold Howe, a senior lecturer on education, said he thinks the report will have a similar effect on the nation's colleges as last year's report by the National Committee on Excellence in Education had on public schools.

"It will promote the benfiny Mnd of self-examination that public schools are going through now," Howe said."

"This will give people it sense of what to aim for," said Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman, an expert in the education field. He added the new report will motivate schools to eliminate the grade inflation and "excessive leniency" that characterize much of higher education today.

But Dean of the Education School Patricia A. Graham said, "because higher education is not required, it is variable in quality and variable in the services it provides."

She cautioned that the general public will not really be concerned "as long as the top is being well-served."

None of the Harvard experts interviewed agreed with the report's emphasis on standards and testing.

Nathan Glazer, professor of educaiton and social structure, said such a solution was not feasible to many areas of the humanities.

"Things are a lot less testable and assessable than the panel indicated," Glzzer said. "If we tried to do it across the board, it would lead to a lot of waste motion."

"It's hard to know what kind of exam would be appropriate to test what they should have learned in college," she said. "I don't know who would think up those tests," Graham added.

Riesman also stressed that the nation's colleges and universities are too heterogenous a group to adopt the panel's broad recommendations.

"All these recommendations have the problem of overgenerality," Riesman said. "There are no snap solutions. The problem seems so enormous."

Professor of Education and Urban Studies Charles V. Willie viewed the whole report with skepticism and said the proposed testing would be culturally based and would not arculturtly reflect the extent of students education.

He also criticized the panel's conclusions regarding the lowered graduate test scores, maintaining the decline might reflect the increased number of college students, rather than a decrease in student quality.

"Quality issues forth from quantity," he concluded