Berlin's Confidential Evaluation of American Universities: The Conrad Report (1897)

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.