Leisure

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Spring 2007

What higher purpose could be tied to education than increasing leisure time? And yet the English songwriter Andy Partridge might have had it right when he complained, "They taught me how to work but they can't leach me how to shirk correctly." Added leisure time appears not to be among the many well-documented benefits of increased educational attainment, according to "Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades," a paper authored by economists Mark Aguiar of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago.

The good news is that leisure time increased for everyone between 1965 and 2003-by six to eight hours per week for men, thanks largely to a decline in work hours, and by four to eight hours per week for women, driven by a decline in time spent on home chores. That's like having five to 10 more weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week.

But the relative disadvantage for more educated people presents a puzzle for the researchers. "Given that the least-educated households experienced the largest gains in leisure, this growing 'inequality' in leisure is the mirror image of the well-documented trends in income and expenditure inequality," they write.

In 1965, people with different levels of education balanced work and play in similar proportions. But the allocation of time started to diverge in 1985. The explanation, according to Aguiar and Hurst, is that total time at work fell by 14 hours per week for loss-educated men but by under nine hours per week for highly educated men. And less-educated women added fewer work hours than highly educated women. Whether all this reflects more professionals being tied to their desks or more undereducated people underemployed in part-time jobs the authors don't say.