A Harvard College education should include more science, more personal contact with professors, and some time spent outside the United States, according to the committees charged with overhauling Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum for the first time in a quarter century.

The report, a year in the making and released to Harvard’s faculty yesterday, also recommends that Harvard scrap its required ‘‘core curriculum,’’ the set of lecture classes devised in 1978 to ensure students were acquainted with the intellectual approaches of many academic disciplines. The core curriculum would be replaced with a more flexible system of requirements that more closely resembles those at other colleges.

The report, which has the support of Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, echoes many of the recommendations Summers has made since assuming leadership of the university in 2001. He has frequently spoken of the increasing importance of science and the need for students to develop a more global outlook.

The 70-page report will be debated by the faculty next week but not voted upon until next year, after the proposals are further refined. Most of the changes could be made within two to three years, said William C. Kirby, dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences, who oversaw the report.

The proposed changes would require significant spending to hire professors and help students pay for travel and research abroad, and Summers said the necessary funding will be a priority. ‘‘My job as president is to make sure that the limits on what our wonderful faculty and students do is imposed only by their imaginations,’’ he said in an interview yesterday.

Harvard’s plan is a response to many leaders’ belief that its curriculum, developed after a similar review in the mid-1970s, does not provide enough choice to students and encourages premature specialization.

Accordingly, it recommends that students should be able to declare their majors later — they currently decide at the end of freshman year — and take fewer classes in their chosen subject.

‘‘We are making a conscious effort to step back from specialization and fragmentation to make sure we give an education that is broad and deep and permits students to be educated across a range of areas of knowledge,’’ Kirby said.

Several Harvard officials spoke yesterday of Harvard’s need to update its education for a world where global connections, cross disciplinary research, and science in general are ever more important. Some of the changes would align a Harvard education more closely to that of many other universities, while a few changes attempt to be pioneering.

Particularly unusual would be the ‘‘expectation’’ — just short of a requirement — that all students spend time overseas, either in a traditional study-abroad program or over a summer, perhaps doing an internship or research. It is an enormous turnaround for an institution that until a few years ago encouraged students not to leave Cambridge, in the belief that Harvard offered the best education in the world.

‘‘As an American institution in an age of unparalleled American influence in the world, we have a special responsibility to educate our students about the world around them,’’ Kirby said.

Although other schools strongly emphasize international education, Harvard officials do not know of a peer institution that ‘‘expects’’ overseas study or work, said associate dean Jeffrey Wolcowitz, the primary author of the report.

Harvard’s core curriculum was an effort to broaden students’ education by requiring them to choose from a list of courses in several areas of study, classes that often focus on a highly speci?c topic and emphasize ‘‘ways of knowing’’ rather than building up knowledge.

The new plan would instead offer a set of optional ‘‘Harvard College Courses,’’ emphasizing knowledge over methodology and spanning wider territory. A life sciences course, for example, might combine molecular and evolutionary biology, psychology and neuroscience, rather than focusing on one of those, said Benedict Gross, Harvard College dean.

Non science majors would also have to take more science, perhaps four classes compared with the two or three they now must take, Wolcowitz said.

Many departments now require their students to take 16 or more classes in their major. That number should be cut to about 12, the report says.

The curriculum review also responds to longstanding critiques that academic guidance is inadequate at Harvard and students don’t get to know their professors. The report recommends that all freshmen take a small seminar class and that all juniors take another one in their concentration. It also seeks to get more teachers involved in the advising system.

Some students familiar with the report said yesterday it lacks a clear plan for how to improve teaching and advising. ‘‘There’s so much about the international experiences, concentration choice, and radically altering general education, but they weren’t as bold and thoughtful about advising and teaching,’’ said Matthew Mahan, president of the undergraduate council, who plans to organize a ‘‘convention’’ in the fall for students to vote on the plan and take their platform to the administration.

Although most of the report’s ideas are not considered radical, ‘‘the Harvard seal of approval means a great deal,’’ and the curriculum review will be closely watched, said Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teachers College.

Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.

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