thought of the day
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Do we take enough vacation days?
One of the major tenets of the time-crunch crowd is that Americans don’t get enough vacation. It’s hard to know, exactly, what is “enough,” but I found an interesting statistic while poking around in Princeton’s alumni surveys done of members of classes having major reunions. Among members of the class of 1994 (that is, people in their mid-late 30s), a full 74% took 3 weeks or more of vacation last year, with nearly 45% taking 4 or more weeks. Another 19% took 2 weeks, meaning that only about 7% took less than 2 weeks.
Note that the question didn’t ask “how many vacation days do you have available?” In recent years, a number of groups have claimed that Americans are leaving vast numbers of vacation days on the table. This survey actually asked how much time people took off. And the answer doesn’t seem to suggest an epidemic of vacation-less Americans.
Of course, one can’t extrapolate from Princetonians to the rest of the country. But if anything, the number of work hours Princetonians claim (with the vast majority working more than 40 per week) would seem to suggest the “workaholism” that the time-crunchers claim leads to forgone vacations. If hard-charging Princetonians are taking their vacations, then maybe the situation isn’t as bleak for everyone else, either.
