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