IN MAY 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a damning report on the state of public education, Entitled "A Nation at Risk," the report cited "a rising tide of mediocrity" in the nation's classrooms and incited a flood of media attention and finger pointing by and at teachers, administrators, parents and politicians.

Now it may be the colleges' turn.

Three reports issued in the last five months have condemned the state of higher education claiming that the tide of mediocrity has engulfed colleges and universities as well The reports, issued by prominent educators, were not nitpicking all three spoke in terms of a crisis on America's college campuses. The most recent, issued in February by the Association of American Colleges, charged that the bachelor's degree issued every year to hundreds of thousands of graduates have become meaningless credentials.

The other two reports were not much softer. The first, issued under the auspices of the National Institute of Education (an arm of the Department of Education), decried the loosening of academic standards and the increasingly vocational orientation of higher education. The report cited as evidence of worsening conditions several statistics, including declining scores on 10 of the 14 subject areas of the Graduate Record Examinations.

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

Among its 27 recommendations, the report called on colleges to establish minimum standards and to test students extensively in both their fields of concentration and general knowledge.

The second report, released in November by then-chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities William J. Bennett, warned that many college graduates lack "even the most rudimentary knowledge about the history, literature, art and philosophical foundations of their nation and civilization."

Placing most of the blame on college faculties, Bennett argued that undergraduate education has been severely crippled by intellectual or ideological faddism, narrow specialization in the graduate schools and too little attention to introductory and lower-division courses.

"All too often teaching is lifeless, arid, and without commitment," Bennett said in the report, "On too many college campuses the curriculum has become a self-service cafeteria through which students pass without being nourished."

Bennett, who is now Secretary of Education, recommended that colleges require courses on the history of Western civilization, literature, philosophy, and proficiency in one foreign language.

The axe fell on faculties again in February when the Association of American Colleges decried "the transformation of the professors from teachers concerned with the characters and minds of their students to professionals, scholars with Ph.D. degrees with an allegiance to academic disciplines stronger than their commitment to teaching or to the life of the institutions where they are employed."

The report stressed that improvements must be made in graduate education to assure that future professors are better prepared to teach. It also recommended that the requirements for the Ph.D. include evaluation of candidates' teaching abilities.

In addition, the panel called on colleges to institute more coherent curricula, instead of merely strengthening distribution requirements or adding multi-disciplinary courses. It proposed a minimum required program of study for all students, consisting of nine different categories.

EXPERTS AGREE that the plethora of criticism is indicative of a conservative trend in American culture, an attempt to recover from what Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Steven Ozment called "the hangover from the '60s," when traditional requirements were generally abandoned under student and faculty pressure. Along with a yen for argyle sweaters and fervent anti-communism. observers have demonstrated a desire for a return to strict standards in higher education. But not everyone thinks that the situation should be presented in such crisis terms.

Dean of the Graduate School of Education Patricia A. Graham likens the current pseudofrenzy to the American reaction to the Launching of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviets in 1957. That event, considered the formal beginning of the superpower "space race," raised concern that America's school, were not doing their job in producing technology whizzes who could rival the Soviets.