Bachelor’s Degree Called Less Valuable

Although the cost of a college education is rising, the value of an undergraduate degree is falling to the point where “almost anything goes,” the Assn. of American Colleges said in announcing the results of a three-year study Sunday.

The association, issuing the study at the opening of its four-day conference, said: “The curriculum has given way to a marketplace philosophy: It is a supermarket where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning. Fads and fashions . . . enter where wisdom and experience should prevail.”

Meanwhile, New York University President John Brademas, in a speech at the association’s meeting Sunday, charged that President Reagan’s proposal to cut $2 billion in student aid amounts to “a declaration of war on middle-income America.”

College Tuition Doubles

The former Indiana congressman urged college presidents to “enter the battle that will be waged this year in Washington.”

Brademas said a number of private institutions have been compelled to more than double tuition over the last decade “and the real cost of higher education continues to far outpace these increases.”

The AAC report, titled “Integrity in the College Curriculum,” focused its attack on professors who, it said, place a higher premium on research and their own advancement than on teaching.

The report said that the message must be “forcefully delivered by academic leaders responsible for undergraduate education to the research universities that have awarded the Ph.D. degree to generation after generation of potential professors professionally unprepared to teach.”

‘Almost Anything Goes’

“As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes,” the report said. “We have reached a point at which we are more confident about the length of a college education than its content and purpose.”

The report capped a three-year study by an 18-member task force chaired by Mark H. Curtis, the association president. The association’s 560 institutional members include half of the nation’s major research and doctoral-granting institutions.

“Evidence of decline and devaluation is everywhere,” the panel said. “Remedial programs, designed to compensate for lack of skill in the English language, abound in the colleges and in the corporate world.”

It urged colleges to adopt “a minimum required curriculum of nine basic intellectual, aesthetic and philosophic experiences.”

The committee described the nine basic skills as: the ability to think abstractly and perform critical analysis; literacy in writing, reading, speaking and listening; understanding numerical data; historical consciousness; the state of being “intellectually at ease with science”; values, or “the capacity to make informed and responsible moral choice”; appreciation of the arts; international and multicultural experiences, and study in depth.