By BERNARD GWERTZMAN

Special to The New York Times

MOSCOW, July 28 - The head of one of the largest industrial enterprises in Leningrad has complained that the emphasis in Soviet society on getting a higher education has made it extremely difficult to lure young people into blue-collar work.

Georgy A. Kulagin, the general director of the Sverdlovi machine tools combine, said that not only have Leningrad! youth for the most part refused to take manual jobs, but also another traditional source of labor - the. countryside - has begun to dry up.

Writing in the current issue; of Literaturnaya Gazeta, Mr.' Kulagin said that in former times the children of workers took over from their parents and kept the factory's "dynasty" alive. But these children now, he said, prompted often by their families and schools, want higher education and become engineers, doctors and; scientists.

It also used to be that Leningrad, the second largest city in the Soviet Union and to many the most attractive, would draw, people yearning to leave the' countryside, he said.

But since 1967, Mr. Kulagin went on, he has noticed that young people from the provinces who once came gladly have lost their desire to forsake their home villages.

"And in addition, those who came and were living in dormitories have quit to return home," he said.

"The improved standard of living in the countryside influenced them to leave," he said, "plus the fact that in Leningrad it is all the harder to get an apartment in which to live."

Mr. Kulagin was alluding to the fact that in recent years, as part of a campaign to retain workers in the countryside, more money has been invested in the agricultural sector. In the cities housing construction has not kept upi with demand.

He complained that many young people who might otherwise take jobs as skilled workers were going on to enter schools and after graduation refusing to take job they felt was beneath their dignity.

"We must seriously consider," he said, "whether we a not preparing too many engineers." He said that in his experience about 80 per cent of the work being done by engineers did not require an engineering diploma, and that sometimes work had to be found for engineers.

Ironically, one of the cardinal points made by Soviet propagandists in proclaiming the superiority of Soviet education over American is that Soviet schools turn out many more engineers than. American schools do.

In 1966, for instance, the Soviet Union said that it had 1.8 million engineers as against 750,000 in the United States,

And in 1966 it reported that 179,000 were graduated from Soviet schools and only 43,000 From American ones.

"It seems to me that it will do no harm, if, taking into account demographic factors and the acute shortage of working reserves, we reduced Dy several times in coming ;ears the number of places in higher education for engineers," Mr. Kulagin said.

He said he had observed that t machine-tool factory in the Jnited States had its own five rear training program. He advocated the adoption of this system in the Soviet Union.

Under the system a youth would join the factory after

finishing high school and for three years get general training. Then he would learn specialty. Some students would be sent to universities to get further specialized training.

The shortage of workers it Mr. Kulagin's plant and in other places also results in part from the fact that the postwar baby boom has subsided. In recent years the Soviet industrial growth rate of workprs has been one of the lowest in Soviet history.

Soviet industry is supposed :o have installed more automated equipment to take up .he slack, but in many cases his has not been done efficiently. ''