In 1896 the Prussian Ministry of Education requested a report to be written about the state of higher education in the United States in order to evaluate developments in academia in the USA. The Berlin minister's aide Friedrich Althoff commissioned the report from economist Prof. Dr. Johannes Conrad (Halle) who had published an empirically oriented history of universities in Germany a decade earlier. Conrad was particularly qualified to write such a report also because he had been the teacher of many American students in Germany, among them Simon Patten who upon his return to the US helped found the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In his report Conrad presents a brief sketch of education in America at primary and secondary level and then analyzes the structure of higher education from the top level of organization to methods of teaching in the classroom. He pays special attention to women in higher education, the role of sports, and the efficiency of university libraries. But he also observes living expenses for students and discovers that American students spend more time in libraries than students at his Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität in Halle.
This edition presents Conrad's report in German and English and has experts analyze it in its context.

Charles E. McClelland (b. Texas 1940) is emeritus professor of history at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He studied at Princeton, Munich and Yale (PhD '67) and taught at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania before coming to UNM in 1974. He was Director of the European Studies Program at UNM for many years and served as president of the UNM and New Mexico AAUP. He retired (early) in 1997 to work as an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow and Fulbright Fellow in Germany, designing and writing part of a multivolume bicentennial history of the University of Berlin. He has also been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and the Zentrum für Inderdisziplinäre Forschung in Germany. He is the author of six major monographs, contributing editor of three further books as well as author of two dozen schol¬arly articles about modern Central European social, intellectual and university history as well as of the modern learned professions.