Clark Kerr, who created the blueprint for public higher education in the United States while president of the University of California system in the 1950's and 60's, died yesterday afternoon in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 92.

Although Mr. Kerr transformed the shape and the scope of public higher education, his contribution was partly eclipsed by the turbulent ending of his reign as chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1952 to 1958 and as head of the full university from 1958 to 1967. His towering reputation as a leader of 20th-century American education was tarnished by his handling of the Free Speech Movement that swept the Berkeley campus in 1964. Caught in a crossfire from students on the left and politicians on the right, he was ousted in 1967 by the new governor, Ronald Reagan.

At the time he quipped, ''I left the presidency just as I had entered it -- fired with enthusiasm.'' But he admitted to close friends that the dismissal hurt him deeply.

Mr. Kerr remained a leading spokesman for higher education, especially known for his work as chairman and director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. He is credited with originating the concept that every student should be entitled to a college education regardless of ability to pay. In 1972 Congress translated that idea into the Basic Educational Opportunity Act, which formed the basis for Pell Grants, the backbone of federal aid to needy students.

''Clark Kerr did for higher education what Henry Ford did for the automobile,'' said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University. ''He mass produced low-cost quality education and research potential for a nation that hungered deeply for both.''

The chancellor of Berkeley, Robert M. Berdahl, said yesterday, ''Clark Kerr is, without question, a legend in higher education.''

As president of the University of California, Mr. Kerr created a multicampus public institution that became the model for the state universities across the nation.

Under Mr. Kerr's plan, California created a three-tier system that became the largest and most admired in the nation; other states sought to emulate its structure and objectives. At the highest academic layer were campuses like Berkeley whose students came from the top 12.5 percent of the state's high school students. A second tier was the state colleges functioning as teaching institutions focusing primarily on undergraduate education, with some graduate courses; they enrolled a third of California students. Community colleges completed the system, offering two-year transfer and vocational programs open to every California high school graduate.

It was an ingenious mixture of populism and elitism. And the timing was right; American culture was ready for a state-supported, widely spread educational supermarket to serve many different needs.

Mr. Kerr's administration coincided with post-World War II optimism and the unprecedented growth of American higher education spurred by the G.I. Bill of Rights and later a concerned nation's response to the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union.

Mr. Kerr coined the term ''multiversity'' in a series of lectures at Harvard and discussed it more broadly in his best-known book, ''The Uses of the University.'' He believed that the university was a ''prime instrument of national purpose.''

In the book, published in 1963, he wrote, ''What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry.''

The term ''multiversity'' accurately described the practices of higher education in mid-20th-century America. A vast techno-educational complex had largely replaced the classic visions of the 19th-century teaching college and the pure research university. No longer an ivory tower, the academy influenced and was influenced by trends and forces in the outside world.

Paradoxically, Mr. Kerr himself was to issue some of the most cogent warnings about giant multiversities. While maintaining that they were inevitable, he warned of the danger of ''knowledge factories'' whose neglect of students through large classes, the use of teaching assistants and the selection of faculty members based on their research expertise rather than instructional capacities could turn those students into an ''alienated'' class.

With his well-known sense of humor, he said his job as a university president was ''to provide sex for the students, football tickets for the alumni and parking for the faculty.'' But to a growing number of students in the 60's, Mr. Kerr had become the apostle of the multiversity, the champion of a dehumanized giant. and they resented his factory imagery.

Matters came to a boiling point in 1964 after the Berkeley administration barred all on-campus solicitation for political or civil rights demonstrations mounted off campus. Political activism at the university had begun to increase in the fall of 1964 after many of its leaders had worked in the civil rights movement over the summer.