He attended St. Johnsbury Academy and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1894.
[1][5] After a year of study in England,[6] Sprague was made Austin Teaching Fellow in political economy, a one-year fixed-term position, at Harvard College in fall 1899.
[6] He was made Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Banking and Finance in 1913, a post he held until his retirement in 1941.
[6] Following his stint at the Bank of England, he served as assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, a role he left the same year due to disagreement over the optimal path to recovery for the US economy.
He was a director of the National Shawmut Bank and a foreign exchange advisor to the General Motors Corporation.