By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti’s best universities are in wreckage, their campuses now jumbles of collapsed concrete, mangled desks and chairs, and buried coursework. Hundreds of professors and students were entombed, although the exact number of dead is complicated by the fact that class lists and computer registries were also wiped out by the quake.

“You’re in class, your professor is talking, you’re writing notes and then you’re buried alive,’’ said Christina Julme, 23, recounting how her semester at State University came to a halt on the afternoon of January 12 .

Ms. Julme, ailing and slipping in and out of consciousness, was pried from her collapsed classroom after two days of having her dead professor’s leg touching her, an injured friend’s face a few inches from her own and classmates’ bodies growing fetid.

The obliteration of higher education is expected to have longstanding effects on this devastated country, where even in the best of times a tiny percentage of young people went on to college.

“What the earthquake has done to us, besides breaking buildings and killing much of the population, it has wiped out many of those who were the future leaders of the country,’’ said Louis Herns Marcelin, a University of Miami sociologist who runs a research institute here. “The impact was huge, but we still don’t even know how huge.’’

The country’s main nursing school is gone, as is the state medical college. The science building at the state university has been ripped open, and the teacher’s college teeters on its side. At the Graduate School of Technology, Jean Foubert Dorancy, 22, climbed atop the wreckage, littered with computer parts, and lamented: “This was the best computer school in Haiti. What do I do now?’’

It was a troubled education system that fell. Many of its buildings were decaying, the result of decades of neglect. Classes were overflowing with students, and many had only mediocre preparation academically because students from the best high schools, the children of the elite, would often go to overseas universities and not come back.

“Most of my friends weren’t studying but were just hanging on the street,’’ said Jacques Gaspard, 38, who was enrolled in a trade school that collapsed. “Now I’m on the street, too. Everybody’s on the street.’’

Haiti’s state university was the only place to earn a degree until the end of the long rule of the Duvaliers in 1986. Since then, scores of universities have opened, many of them slipshod institutions without accreditation, but others are well-run schools open to talented students regardless of their means.

There are already plans to revive Haiti’s universities using tents or temporary structures until more permanent structures can be built.

It was arguably a shortage of professionals in Haiti that ensured so much of Haiti would collapse. “There’s a total lack of qualified architects, urban planners, builders and zoning experts,’’ said Conor Bohan, an American who founded the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, a scholarship program for students with top grades but few resources. “People were living in substandard housing in places where they shouldn’t have been.’’

With classes canceled for the foreseeable future, many students are using their free time to help with the recovery effort. Future doctors are pitching in at field hospitals and helping arrange a major vaccination campaign. Psychology students are talking with displaced people about how they are holding up. Ms. Julme, who studied communications, managed to get a job at the United Nations radio station, although she focuses on music, not news, to get her mind, and the minds of her listeners, off of all the awful things that have occurred.

“The dean is dead,’’ she said of her destroyed linguistics college. “The vice dean is dead. I don’t see how the university can go on.’’