As the time stacks up, the place becomes its own draw. We go there because we always go there. And it is a good place to spend a week as a family, particularly the house we have been renting these past few years. It is right by the ocean, with views of the water from the gigantic front porch and almost every bedroom. We went to Days’ Ice Cream every night. I ran on the boardwalk several times. I took the big kids to the Silverball Museum in Asbury, where we played on all manner of pinball machines, and it appears that my daughter’s Under 13 Girls record on one machine still stands. My husband and I went to the Asbury beer garden — so I could cross that one off my summer fun list. The kids jumped a great many waves and built a great many sandcastles.

And a highlight unique to this year: I scored a 1982 copy of Martha Stewart’s Entertaining from the free beach book bin. I’ve been reading through that and learning about Martha before she was Martha. In her catering life, she once produced a 1000-person outdoor party where she hired young actors to create fairy scenes. When she once found herself short on working burners she boiled pasta in an oven. The woman is resourceful to say the least.

The weather was amazingly cooperative. It was warm, but not blazingly hot. We only had rain for half a day toward the end (Hurricane Henri came through after). Travel with a toddler isn’t exactly easy but between my husband and me and my mother-in-law and a family friend who visited for a few days, we had a lot of hands.

The day before we left, my husband’s phone popped up a picture from Ocean Grove in 2014. The kids were 7, 4, and 2 — and there were only three of them! They were so little. Time keeps passing. But it’s nice to come back to the same place as time passes. We like to travel other places too, which is one reason we’ve never really looked into buying a beach place even though we go to the same town every summer. But for a week or so, we settle into the rhythm of shore life, noting the tides, watching the waves and the moon as it glints on the water. I just put in my request for next year’s dates, so it looks like the tradition will continue.

In other news: I took the big kids apple picking on Saturday at the same place we went for peaches a little over a month ago. The peaches were still in season, but so were the early apples, so we got both! We always buy Honeycrisp apples at the grocery store, but I miss the window to pick them every year because — it turns out — it is a mid-August/early September apple, and NOT a fall apple, at least in this growing region. So, if you happen to be a fan of Honeycrisps and similar style apples, and you’re interested in picking them, you might want to look into that soon.

In other, other news: My husband and I are both training for a half marathon here in Philadelphia in mid/late September. I don’t follow a formal plan for half training, though I generally try to do 1-2 10-milers. I’ve done one this summer and plan to do another next weekend. This weekend I did about 9 miles. I focus on trying to accumulate minutes over 60 minutes spent running, with a particular focus on minutes over 90 minutes. I was slow this weekend, so my 9 miles definitely accumulated some of those.

I’m also fascinated by a WSJ article (paywall, but just search around and you’ll see people talking about it) about people working two full-time remote jobs at once. The point several people made is that they were only doing about 10-15 hours of real work in the office and were just wasting time. Once they could work remotely, they simply filled the time with other things. Some people spend time with family or take up hobbies. These people found second jobs. While any time you have to hide something, that suggests some ethical issues, I think this should best be viewed as a wake-up call for managers to really think about how to use employees productively. Time is a valuable resource, and even if you feel you are paying for a certain amount of it, in much white collar work, you’re paying more for tasks than time. So it seems a shame to waste time for no good reason.

Ken Honda, also known as the “Zen Millionaire,” frequently tells the story of how he came to his second career. He was at a park with his daughter when he witnessed a mother and child fighting. Mom wanted to leave the park. Mom said she had to go to work, and the daughter wanted to play longer. Ken spoke and has written of feeling so terrible that mom “had” to work. If only she had handled her money better! He needed to teach people how to have a better relationship with money!

And so even though he had “retired” at the age of 29…he needed to go back to work teaching mothers that if they don’t want to spend all day pushing their kids on the swings it must be because they are terrible with money. OK, that last bit is my editorial comment. He sounds like a lovely person in general, and I know his advice has been helpful for a lot of people — men and women. 

But… I have been pondering why that story bothered me so much. As I think about it, my annoyance goes beyond the particular men-judging-mothers-who-are-not-100%-available-for-their-children’s-every-desire angle, to a problem I have with parts of the “FIRE” movement.

FIRE stands for “financial independence, retire early.” I am a big fan of financial independence. I’ve talked before about how my husband and I are both naturally frugal people. We’ve also both been working for decades. This has happy results in terms of resources — something I am profoundly grateful for. When we have more resources, we have more choices in our lives. This includes a lot of choices about work — for both of us!

So why aren’t either of us at the park all day? Retiring early is a different matter. Some of the loudest voices talking about FIRE can come across as stridently anti-work. Work is that evil thing keeping you from pushing your child on the swings for three hours in the park. Work consumes your life force, and thus all expenditures must be measured in terms of the amount of life they suck away from you as you make the acquisition. But for this to make sense, we have to define work as “something you don’t want to do.” Or “something someone else makes you do from at least 9 to 5 in a specific location every work day with only two weeks off per year.” So you’ll hear people talking about having “retired” at some ridiculously young age…and then gone on to do other income-generating, time-filling, productive activities such as writing books, hosting podcasts, giving speeches, running websites, etc. This sounds suspiciously like what I do for a living now.

It’s not exactly retirement, it’s trading one career for another. At least Honda calls it a second career. Some people don’t even acknowledge that. If you don’t have to do it, it must not be work! 

But this isn’t exactly a workable definition for “work.” Following that train of thought, people would go in and out of work all day long as they do things they want to do or don’t want to do.

I think that there can be a more nuanced approach to this than singing the praises of retiring early. Yes, work toward financial independence! Better yet, achieve it. But also try to figure out what kind of work you wouldn’t want to retire from. For those just starting out, I’d note that there’s no law against having your second career first. Work can be a source of great joy in your life. I am rarely happier than when I am working toward a big professional goal such as writing a book, and really throwing myself into it, to the point of achieving flow. When you spend your hours doing work you find meaningful, time can seem to fly by and stand still. It really is magical.

I hope my kids find work like that too. I’m not working because I mishandled my money (I’d also note that according to this Pew poll, only 2 percent of mothers who work full-time say that at this point in their life it would be best for them to stay home full-time with their kids, with 14 percent saying it would be best to work part-time, whereas a full 25 percent of mothers who are not employed say it would be best for them to work full-time, with another 35 percent wanting to work part-time). I’m working because I enjoy it and think I have something to offer the world in addition to my ability to push children on swings. I get to do both! As did the mother in the original anecdote. I’d point out that she was there at the park before heading out — one wonders where the dad was. Working? Watching TV? Who knows — not there to get judged, I guess.

Have you made changes in your career to get more freedom and flexibility?

But what does that mean?

That was the question a reader was facing when she wrote me recently. She had arranged for two weeks off after she ended her current position, and before she started a new job. Her kids would continue with their usual school and childcare arrangements. This meant that, during business hours, she was more or less free.

She had identified some writing projects she wanted to do, and she was looking for either a class or a coach to keep her accountable. I thought this was smart, but I also thought it was an interesting question to consider more broadly.

If you had two weeks off in this situation, what would you do with it?

Travel is a possibility, though taking two weeks away solo would require some negotiations with other people when kids are involved. Most likely, for most of us, this would be more like a 2-week staycation, except that when you’re in your same home environment, it’s easy to do what you always do. Next thing you know a school day disappears into a grocery shopping trip, returning a sweater at the mall, and sorting the mail pile. I understand the desire to do “nothing,” but often, “nothing” means a lot of cleaning the house. These days of open time slip away without much to show for them. The house will just get dirty again.

I suspect many of us would want some sort of doable project — which would deliver the satisfaction of accomplishing something we wouldn’t normally do, but wouldn’t be too taxing. After all, the new job might deliver its own stresses soon enough. And in general, I think it’s a good idea to map out a plan for the two weeks, so some good stuff happens. Anchor events are good for weekends, and they’re good for longer periods of time off too. When there is stuff to look forward to, time feels better in general.

So what would you do?

Photo: I might take some day trips to the beach…

I have been thinking of these questions because I recently read Jennifer Barrett’s new book, Think Like a Breadwinner. (She was also a guest on the How to Money podcast this week, if people want to listen to that!)

In this book, Jennifer argues that a great many women do not grow up thinking that their personal career and money choices might determine their family’s living standards. She didn’t. She spent her younger years in fairly low-paying jobs, figuring if she was keeping up with the bills, she was OK. Then — in a dark-night-of-the-soul, middle-of-the-night crisis — she realized that she wanted to buy a home and have a second baby. Her husband, who’d experienced some recent career setbacks, wasn’t particularly poised to make that happen. Cue the angst until she discovered…oh wait. He’s not the only adult around here. She made some career moves that allowed her to earn more and create the life she wanted for her family, in the process re-examining many of the money scripts she hadn’t questioned until then.

For many women, growing up, the assumption — of what is the norm, the default — is that there will be another adult in the household who earns more. This guides all sorts of choices — of careers, of the acceptability of certain salaries, of the desirability of flexible jobs vs. ones with higher earning potential. Many men, on the other hand, grow up believing that their income, and quite possibly their income alone, could determine their family’s living standards. Sometimes this is even explicit. I know I’ve talked to a lot of young men who mention wanting to earn enough “so my wife doesn’t need to work if she doesn’t want to.” If the person is entering a job not known for high pay, he might figure out other income streams (Joel on How to Money, for instance, has talked about aiming, early on, to augment his radio business salary with rental income). I cannot recall a young woman saying that so clearly.

There is nothing wrong with the family structure where the male half of a heterosexual couple happens to out-earn the female half (I live in one such family!) The issue is that a reasonable number of families will wind up with a female breadwinner at some point, whether by circumstance or because Mom turns out to be much, much better at money-generation. When this reality bangs up against a lot of cultural conditioning, this can be jarring for all involved. I wrote, a great many years ago, about a strange “money success story” of a family accepting a reduced standard of living because they found it so critical that Dad be the breadwinner.

In any case, Jennifer encourages women to develop more of a breadwinner mindset — taking your income growth, wealth building, and career development seriously as a way to serve your family. While I found parts of the book meandering, I did appreciate that this is a not-so-common message. A lot of personal finance literature aimed at women is about cutting back (so you can work less and live on your husband’s income) or about saving up for that pair of shoes or a girl’s get-away. Some of the advanced stuff talks about saving for retirement in your company’s 401k. It’s rarely about increasing your income potential and wealth building with the goal of giving your family the life you want long before retirement.

What money stories did you grow up with? If you are female, how much weight did you give income, and the need to support a family, when thinking about career possibilities?

It turns out we know the answer to this in pretty rich detail. I’ve spent some time over the past few days perusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. This survey compares the mean and median hourly wages for 800 different occupational titles, and is well worth a look.

Some median wage comparisons:

• Lodging managers: $22.26, mall superintendents: $28.26, gaming managers: $32.40
• Claims adjustor: $27.46, Tax preparer: $14.45, loan officer: $26.38
• Statistician: $35.01, Actuary: $41.93, Computer programmer: $34.10
• Architect: $34.95, landscape architect: $29.12
• Civil engineer: $36.82, aerospace engineer: $45.57, Petroleum engineer: $52.36
• Astronomer: $50.35, Atmospheric scientist: $40.73
• Preschool teacher: $11.80, adult ed/GED: $22.08
• Fashion designer: $30.90, interior designer: $22.20
• Reporters: $16.52, editors: $24.42, technical writers: $30.16, writers & authors: $25.91, PR: $24.98
• And on it goes…

Of course, all of these have caveats. The 13,620 Americans who list their occupation as “athlete” may earn $80,950 per year on average, but this encompasses quite a range. There are probably not too many athletes who actually earn $80,950. Even “writer” shows quite a range between the median and the mean. Some people do very well and some do not do so well at all. Whereas I’m guessing that most petroleum engineers cluster around a similar wage.

But I wonder how many people look at such a list when choosing an occupation? I imagine that most lodging managers could also be mall superintendents after a learning curve if they chose to go in that direction, and vice versa. A $6/hour difference translates into an additional $12,000 a year. That’s $1000 a month — enough to afford a lot of little luxuries, or to save more aggressively. While it’s usually not worth taking a job you don’t like for the money, if you don’t like your current job, it’s always possible you’ll like a similar, but slightly better paying one, more. It’s worth looking around.

In the pilot, four coupon enthusiasts took a camera crew shopping and explained their tricks. They followed roughly the same methodology — match manufacturer coupons with store sales and stock up when you get a steal — but they each had their own quirks. Amanda Ostrowski of Cincinnati, OH bought a $35,000 insurance policy for her stockpile. Joanie Demer of McKinleyville, CA took her son and her pregnant friend dumpster diving for discarded circulars, in order to cut a $638.64 grocery bill down to $2.64. Joyce House, a retired nurse in Philadelphia, claimed not to have paid for toothpaste or deodorant in 34 years. And Nathan Engels of Villa Hills, KY (“Mr. Coupon“) invested in an industrial paper cutter for faster clipping. He special ordered 1100 boxes of Total once he realized he could get $4000 worth for about $150.

For Engels, it was all a game, “like chess,” he said in the show. “You’re trying to beat the opponent, which is the store.” He donated the Total to a food bank, thus playing Robin Hood with his coupons — certainly a creative way to help the needy in his community. But I don’t think the reason the show is so popular is the potential for low budget philanthropy. Rather, in these tight times, people are fascinated by coupons because they represent a certain mindset — a certain thrifty mindset, which has been celebrated since Ben Franklin told us that a penny saved is a penny earned. Many of us pride ourselves on our ability to stretch a dollar, even if this stretching is sometimes absurd. As Betty Friedan summed up the gospel of thrift in The Feminine Mystique, “Women can save more money by their managerial talents inside the home than they can bring into it by outside work.” (We’ll consider Engels an honorary woman).

How often the gospel of thrift is true in practice is an open question. Ostrowski works full time as a storage facility manager, yet still told Extreme Couponing that she devoted 70 hours a week to her habit. I’m always skeptical of 70-hour workweek claims, but if this is true, in 70 hours she cut her $1,175.33 bill down to $51.67, after paying $70 to a clipping service. So that’s $1,053.66 in savings. If that was one week’s haul, she’d net about $15 an hour. That’s decent, and if she’s overestimating her couponing time, the rate per hour comes out much better. However, since a normal 2-person household with no children would never have bought four-figures worth of groceries for one week (it’s a fine line between stockpiling and hoarding), it’s not clear how much she’s actually “saving.”

I find the whole thing fascinating. I’m currently slaving away on my money book, and am working on the income chapter right now. While we all have fat in our budgets, I believe that for increasing numbers of us, it’s actually much more pleasant to try to earn more than spend less. Unless you sell your stockpile (an interesting idea), clipping coupons definitely falls in the “cutting” category. There’s always a limit to how much you can cut — and groceries represent a relatively small percentage of the average family’s budget. But at least in theory there’s no limit to how much you can earn. What do you think?

In other news:

• The Renegade Writer runs a lengthy Q&A with me on time management, writing, core competencies, etc.
• Over at OwnTheDollar, Hank Coleman writes a nice review of 168 Hours. As he says, “I have a bookshelf full of hundreds of personal finance, investing, and productivity books. There are very few that I read cover to cover, and there are even less that [I] break out my highlighter for. Laura Vanderkam’s book 168 Hours is yellow through and through.”

ShareThis

That’s why more thoughtful finance writers point out that if you have big goals, you have two more effective choices: cut the big spending (that is, move to a smaller house, get rid of a car), or raise your income. Difficult? Sure. But on the second option, there are many ways to try. I have been reading through a wonderful post over at Get Rich Slowly on all the ways people can boost what’s coming in (the post seems to have taken the author 8 hours and has dozens of links – I love the blogosphere! We get access to this for free!)

The options range from trying to earn more at your current job to moonlighting, to starting a side business, starting a “real” business, or even just selling old stuff. Amanda Steinberg over at DailyWorth was recently describing to me Ramit Sethi’s (I Will Teach You To Be Rich) gig doing courses on how to earn $1000 on the side. The idea is that once you figure out the first thousand, you’ll be in more of a free agent mindset, and know how to ramp this up. Since I’ve pretty much always worked for myself, I can definitely say this is true. I know exactly how I’d earn another $1000 — pitch a few editors and see what comes in (of course this raises the question that if I know this, why don’t I do this? The answer is that I’m not maximizing my income since I’m trying to focus long term on writing books. It’s a gamble, but I’m betting that getting lots of name recognition as a book author will make it easier to sell longer, think-y articles in the future).

Regardless, it’s an interesting thought exercise to ponder how you’d raise another $1000. Especially if you could earn it doing something you didn’t hate, a few rounds of this would mean not having to give up going out to eat on occasion.

In other thoughts:

• There are some parallels with this and the recommendations of the deficit reduction panel. People are howling over their recommendations, but they seem to have realized that if you’re deep in debt, there are only so many lattes (earmarks) you can cut. Better to look at the house, car and other big payments (Social Security, Medicare and defense). That’s where the money is. As a nation we could also try to earn more money, but even with tax increases, that won’t really happen until the economy is growing faster.
• I’ll be hosting a holiday time management webinar on December 2 around lunch time. More details to come on this in the next few days. The holidays can be hectic, but are also great for asking what we’d like to be doing with our time. What traditions matter? What will bring us closer to our families?

ShareThis

By Laura Vanderkam

Kiki Okaly has a great résumé for a young engineer, with a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University and multiple internships. Unfortunately, when she graduated this spring, she faced the bleakest job market in decades. She handed in her résumé at “countless” career fairs, but despite a few interviews, “none of them resulted in job offers.”

Her solution? She took out loans and enrolled in a masters program in structural engineering at Lehigh, wagering that “having my masters puts me on the top of the pile for all job applicants this coming year.”

Plenty of other people are making the same bet. The Council of Graduate Schools reports that applications from American students rose 9% in 2010. When the economy slumps, “school becomes a safe haven” from un- or under-employment, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown UniversityCenter on Education and the Workforce. You gain skills and bide your time. The question is, “Does that do you any better when you get out?”

Unfortunately, despite the rising cost of education, the answer is no longer as clear as it once was. As we are discovering with home loans, “anytime you borrow money to gain upward mobility, it’s a gamble,” notes Jodi Nelson, a filmmaker who is pursuing a Ph.D. in film/media.

It’s often a smart gamble (in Okaly’s case, the engineering market seems to be reviving), but here’s something that isn’t in doubt this back-to-school season: Life in the modern economy is uncertain. You can hit that uncertainty at age 18, 22, 25, 30, or later, but eventually you’re going to have to spin the wheel. Whether you go to grad school or not, the smartest thing to learn might be how to enjoy the game.

An outdated mindset

The model that “most Americans walk around with in their heads — and it used to work — is that the longer you stay in school, the more money you make,” Carnevale says.

Degrees do confer some advantages; the unemployment rate among those with bachelor’s degrees or more is 5%,  vs. 9.6% overall.

Even so, “the gains from going to college have stagnated” for certain groups and occupations, reports Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University. One potential explanation? College students these days spend about 14 hours per week studying, according to a new report from the American Enterprise Institute, vs. 24 hours in 1961. This decline has happened within majors, among those at highly selective schools, and even among students who don’t have part-time jobs. Perhaps college is worth less (in some cases) because we’re studying less. Or, perhaps the problem is that 70% of high school graduates now enroll in college, “most of them to get a piece of paper that they think will let them lead an upper-middle-class life,” says Vedder. “It’s becoming mathematically impossible for that to happen.” We cannot all earn more than average.

If most of us try college, though, few Americans attempt graduate education, which suggests that a graduate degree might offer the edge that a college degree does not. More training can be helpful; Okaly says that “in three months of grad school, I’ve learned more than during all of undergrad,” with a focus on the practical aspects of engineering projects.

Yale economist Lisa Kahn famously found that college-educated white men lost 6%-7% in initial earnings for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. Even after 15 years, the gap was about 2.5%. Less reported: One of the reasons the gap narrowed is that those who graduated in recessions were more likely to go to grad school which, over time, raised their earnings.

‘The degree doesn’t save you’

But “underneath those averages are huge variations,” reports Carnevale.

I asked Adam Ruben, a Ph.D.-holding molecular biologist and author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to go to Grad School, whether grad school was a good idea if the alternative was waitressing. “I know people who have gotten graduate degrees and then end up waitressing,” he told me, only this time with 5-figures of loans. “Even the degree doesn’t save you all the time.”

The dark side of a belief that more education is universally good is a lack of rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Databases on the returns on extra degrees in different occupations exist, but “most people don’t go bother to look,” Carnevale says.

Here’s a general rule: If you have a scholarship, there’s little downside. Jenn Kloc, a 2010 graduate of DePaul, is pursuing a Master of Science in Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign partly because she is getting paid to teach; with the job market “bad across the field,” Kloc had nothing to lose by “having this year in graduate school to focus intensely on journalism.” One discovery, though, is that there’s no reason to believe that the situation will be better in 2011. “We’re going to have to get more comfortable with the idea of being more entrepreneurial,” she says.

Kloc’s on to something — what our current obsession with raising Americans’ skill levels misses is that all the education in the world won’t help if jobs don’t exist. But there are ways to learn to live with that. The job market wasn’t great eight years ago when I faced it, either. Rather than go to graduate school, I started freelancing for various places. Over time I learned to find new clients, pitch projects, manage my pipeline and make as good a living as I would have in a normal job. Few schools teach these skills — but if they did, that would make a degree worthwhile.

Laura Vanderkam, author of168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

ShareThis

But what if there’s more to the story? Some new data is showing that the question of why people earn more or less is quite nuanced. In some cases there is pretty blatant gender discrimination. In others, it involves questions of how we spend our 168 hours, with women doing pretty well when they want to.

So let’s look at the whole situation. I read a short story in the Wall Street Journal this morning highlighting research from Reach Advisors which found that, based on Census data, young single women earn more than their male peers in most U.S. cities. In general, they earned $1.08 to a comparable man’s dollar (that is, 8% more). In Atlanta, their wages were 121% the level of their male counterparts (they earned $1.21 to the dollar).

This is quite a large gap, and it reflects a few things — most importantly, that more women than men are going to and graduating from college. When women are young and single, they also appear to be going “full in” to the labor force. That is, they take high-paying, full-time jobs, without any worries that this will hurt their chances in the marriage market (and it won’t, as my friend Christine Whelan has documented in her book Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, using Census data).

But, of course, as pundits will point out, women do not stay single and childless. Some 80% of us will have children. There is some evidence that mothers are treated differently at work, even in “big” jobs. Indeed, in “big” jobs, women in general may be discriminated against. Several years ago, I reviewed a book called Selling Women Short by Louise Marie Roth. She tracked people who earned MBAs between 1991 and 1993, and took jobs on Wall Street. Roughly 6-8 years into their careers, she compared their salaries and workweeks. She found that fathers earned $590,625. Mothers earned $314,357. Childless women earned $356,944. The fascinating part about those numbers is that childless women were actually working more hours per week than the fathers. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of discrimination, and indeed Roth uncovered various ways that banks shunted women into groups that did not land the big bonuses. (For instance, assigning them to teams which served women-owned businesses. The idea was to make these female CEOs/founders feel more comfortable, which makes sense, but since women-owned businesses tend to be smaller and less capitalized, this hurt the Wall Street women’s earnings).

But this direction of the time gap — in which a big group of women were working more hours than men — is not the broad state of affairs. According to the American Time Use Survey, in families where both spouses work full time, moms spend 5.14 hours per day on work and work-related activities. Fathers spend 5.98 hours. This means that moms are working a 36 hour week, and fathers are working close to a 42 hour week. In other words, fathers are working about 17% more than comparable mothers. When you look at all women, the time-gap for full-time male and female workers is closer to 10%. But this is still roughly half the pay gap.

Women do, of course, work more at home. In couples with kids where mom and dad both work full time, moms spend just shy of 3 more hours on interactive childcare per week. They spend just shy of 5 more hours on household tasks. There are serious arguments to be made that caregiving should be valued more than it is (I’m not so sure about housework). But is that really something that employers should be leveling?

Unfortunately for those who want a quicker solution, I think that in general, this state of affairs will level as a result of millions of household conversations and negotiations. Many of these are already taking place. As I’ve written before, when I drop my 3-year-old off at school (it’s a full-time program, so pretty much 100% of the families are 2-career couples), I’m sometimes the only mom in the elevator with a group of dads. Just because you are the female half of the couple doesn’t mean you have to do the laundry. More critically, you can trade off nights of working late or going to networking functions.

But closing this gap also means that moms have to want to work more — and many simply don’t. If (according to a DailyWorth poll), the majority of moms who work full-time wish to work part-time, this suggests that most full-timers are not looking for ways to increase their hours to match comparable fathers’. Which means that, overall, the pay gap could be with us for a while.

A generation ago, a college degree was the ticket to a comfortable, upper-middle class existence. We believe, as a society, that more education means more income, and in general this is still true. The unemployment rate for college educated people is much lower than for people with less education.

But the returns on a college education have been declining for some time, even as costs have skyrocketed. A college degree is no longer a guarantee of a comfortable existence. Why is this? Perhaps it is because more people are going to college — and we cannot all, alas, earn more than average.

But the American Enterprise Institute released an interesting report this month claiming that part of the problem may be how college students spend their time. According to various time diary studies analyzed by researchers Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, in 1961, students at 4-year colleges spent 24 hours per week studying. By 2003, this had fallen to 14 hours per week.

There could be many plausible explanations for this besides laziness. Perhaps students are working more to pay for school. Perhaps they have more family responsibilities. Perhaps, as the first in their families to go to college, they are facing other obstacles. Perhaps, as more Americans go to college, more people are attending schools that don’t require as much study. Perhaps we are majoring in topics that require less study, or perhaps technology has made learning more efficient.

The authors look at each of these explanations, and find that most don’t hold up. Students are working more, but even among students who are not employed, study hours have fallen. They have fallen among students whose fathers also went to college, and they have fallen within majors. They have fallen among students who attend the most selective colleges. While it is true that the Internet and word processing make writing papers easier, the bulk of the decline in study hours came prior to the 10 years before the 2003-2005 numbers. It really just appears that students are studying less.

Why? Given that students are paying so much more for college these days (in many cases shouldering staggering debts) you’d think they’d have more skin in the game. The authors posit that perhaps college has become a signaling device for employers — the fact that you got a degree is more important in the job market than your actual grades. You can work hard in high school to get in, and then coast after that. Perhaps grade inflation contributes to this as well. If you know you’ll get an A or a B in most classes, why put in more work, particularly if employers don’t care about your grades?

These explanations make sense, but there’s a problem with this trend because when you study less, you learn less. And the authors note that there’s evidence that when you study less, you earn less too. Which would explain why the returns on a college education are declining.