ABOUT EDUCATION
Published By: NYT, March 15, 1983, Fred M. Hechinger

THE treatment of foreign students by American colleges and universities is in a state of chaos created by ignorance, prejudice and the absence of planning. Concern over national security and foreign competition threaten to reduce American willingness to admit foreign students, and conditions are made worse by anarchy in Federal policies and parochialism in state legislatures. At the universities themselves, many administrators are embarrassed to acknowledge the presence of large numbers of foreign students, even though their graduate departments often depend for their very existence on those students.

These facts emerge from a study by Craufurd D. Goodwin, dean of the graduate school and professor of economics at Duke University, and Michael Nacht, associate director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Their findings have been published in a 50-page report, ''Absence of Decision,'' by the Institute of International Education, under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The authors warn that the threatened imposition of dramatically higher tuition for foreign students in some states could seriously reduce their numbers to the detriment of the academic institutions, local economies and the national interest.

Although the number of foreign students has grown since World War II from nearly nothing to more than 300,000, there is no consistent policy governing them, the researchers found in a study that concentrated on institutions in Florida, Ohio and California.

They found that, largely because not enough American students are willing to make the intellectual effort and financial sacrifice required for advanced study in engineering, many graduate engineering programs, even at some of the most prestigious institutions, draw 70 percent or more of their students from abroad. ''Several engineering deans,'' the report says, ''suggested that without foreign students they would have had to close down their graduate program in the short run and their whole operation ultimately.'' Since graduate students are essential labor in university laboratories, much research vital to the national interest would ''grind to a halt,'' without foreign students, the report warns. For this and many other reasons, the authors insist that foreign students are beneficial to the campuses. But if the students are to receive full benefits from their experience, they require help - placement, guidance, language instruction and other services. Often such attention was found lacking.

The report emphasizes that the education of foreign students, like grain and arms, is one of the nation's few remaining stable ''export industries,'' and one with few strong competitors. ''It is striking,'' the authors say, ''that nations notoriously critical of the United States send their students to colleges and universities here'' - and not only to engineering and agriculture programs but to liberal arts colleges as well.

Yet, the researchers found, many university administrators think of foreign students mainly as bodies to fill their classes and dormitories, without making adequate academic and social preparations, which is ''like inviting guests to your home when you have no guest room.''

At the same time, state legislatures, sometimes in revulsion against a foreign government's conduct - Iran's, for example - or in response to a local fiscal crisis, threaten to impose special fees on foreign students or charge them with the full cost of their education. Since American students' education is heavily subsidized -through income from endowment and gifts on private campuses and through tax support at public ones - such a move would severely reduce the number of foreign students who can afford to study here, Dr. Goodwin warned in an interview last week. He pointed out that Britain instituted such a policy two years ago, with such dire consequences in reduced enrollments and international ill will that Prime Minister Thatcher has recently ordered the policy rescinded.

Many university administrators, Dr. Goodwin reported, seem to feel that having many foreign students is ''a sign of failure,'' and so they pretend such students don't exist. ''Senior administrators often did not know how many foreign students they had - not even within a range of 1,000,'' he said. ''It wasn't hard to get a chauvinistic outburst out of some of them. Others were simply embarrassed to talk about it.''

There is, he said, a feeling among American academics that ''recruiting'' foreign students ''is a dirty thing to do,'' even though the most prestigious colleges regularly recruit the American students they want.

At the Federal level, Dr. Goodwin felt, nobody comes to grips with the political and economic implications. ''We had a sense of anarchy,'' he said, with no coordinated policy.

Indicating the confusion, one graduate dean reported that the State Department had urged his university to accommodate students from China, whereas the Defense Department was strongly opposed, even though the campus had no classified research.

Dr. Nacht expressed concern that the political heat is building up over issues of national security and economic protectionism. He sees a growing danger in Federal policies that attribute the development of sophisticated weapons by America's adversaries to the fact that foreign students are allowed to benefit from American higher education.

Similarly, Dr. Nacht feels, American self-confidence continues to decline in the matter of trade competition. ''Instead of being proud of our accomplishments, we become defensive and ask why we should let those people come in and learn our technology,'' he said, deploring the ''drift to nationalism'' and the ''tendency to close down.''

But the main burden of bringing order out of chaos, Dr. Goodwin concluded, is for ''each institution to examine itself.''