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 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 university in Halle.
This edition presents Conrad's report in German and English for the first time and has experts analyze it in its context.

Dr. Martin Meyer (b. 1956) retired from teaching American Literature and Culture at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 2022. He studied in Münster, Heidelberg, and on a student Fulbright grant at UNM in Albuquerque, N.M. He took his Staatsexamen at Heidelberg University in 1985 majoring in English and Political Science. His doctoral dissertation (Universität Kassel, 1992) and other publications focus on the portrayal of post¬war Germany in fiction by Thomas Berger, Kay Boyle, Charles Haldeman, John Hawkes, William Gardner Smith, Leon Uris and other American authors. Some of his publications deal with the reception of American literature in Germany after 1945 and with the history of the Armed Services Editions. He is also interested in letters from the front (Feldpost), which he has edited and published, in the American short story, and in book history.