Affordable Care Act and Adjunct Faculty

Increasingly, administrators appear to have an obsession over how to count the actual work hours of an adjunct.  There is a threshold of 30 hours a week before the districts would have to pay for healthcare.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed notes that in a meeting with the IRS, many administrators were asked to include prep time and office hours.  This is actually a problem since they don't get paid for those hours, but they want to use those hours in terms of defining whether or not they work 30 hours.


The IRS isn't helping to make this very clear.  They stated in this other Chronicle of Higher Ed article that:

The Internal Revenue Service didn't provide a formula to calculate the workload of adjuncts when the law's proposed rules were announced in January. It simply advised universities to "use a reasonable method for crediting hours of service," adding that it would not be "reasonable" to take into account "only classroom or instruction time and not other hours that are necessary to perform the employee's duties, such as class-preparation time."

American Association of University Professors notes how this is very troublesome.  They are concerned about how 4 year adjuncts might also be treated.  MSNBC notes many are cutting back adjunct hours simply to avoid paying healthcare.  American Association of Community Colleges report that the IRS issued a statement.

The American Council on Education has a proposal and offers two solutions.  It is in PDF format.  Their formula takes in a percentage of the workload of a full timer as a measuring stick.  Another is a 1 to 1 ratio.

A second method of calculating the total hours worked by adjunct faculty would be to credit adjunct faculty members with one hour of work outside the classroom for each hour teaching in the classroom.