A $2.5-million private grant received this week by the School of Public Health (SPH) will establish a national resource center in health policy and management, Harvard officials said yesterday.

A major objective of the center will be to develop skills for coping with future health care cutbacks, like those proposed by the Reagan administration, Marc J. Roberts, head of the SPH's Department of Health Policy and Management, said yesterday.

"All across the country people in the health fields have to decide where to cut back and where to switch money around," Roberts said, adding that the new center will focus on techniques for evaluating the cutbacks' effects "explicitly and numerically" instead of "using intuition and prejudice."

The Pew Memorial Trust of Philadelphia, which donated the money, two years ago gave the SPH $200,000 for a study on increasing hospital costs, which will be completed this summer.

The latest grant will be used to build a curriculum for training about 400 individuals annually in budget-reduction skills.

"As the government withdraws support we have to find ways to deliver health care to the needy more efficiently," Dr. Howard H. Hiatt, dean of the SPH, said yesterday.

The new health center will "provide the kind of leadership and training" that is necessary to serve the "very young and the very old, who will be hurt most" by Reagan's health care reductions, Hiatt added.

Creating the curriculum for one session of a management class that meets three times a week for 15 weeks costs up to $20,000, Roberts said.