University officials haven’t decided how the university will — or won’t — offer health insurance to its part-time faculty professors.
For students, the answer is clearer — they will not be offered health insurance for working as a Ohio University employee under the Affordable Care Act.
Once the Affordable Care Act is enacted, OU and numerous other entities will be mandated to provide health insurance to employees who work more than 29 hours, which will change the definition — and hiring policy — for the group III part-time faculty position, also known as adjunct professors.
It typically costs the university $11,321 per employee for group health insurance, according to a previous Post article.
Usually, colleges hire adjunct faculty as part-time professors, generally for a temporary period of time, but they can be used to teach more classes and meet the colleges’ needs, said Robert Frank, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who has helped the university adjust to the new law.
Over the past five academic years, the university has hired increasingly more adjunct faculty.
“When demand for courses varies, you’re more likely to see more adjunct faculty, for example in the high demand freshman courses,” Frank said.
For the 2013-14 academic year, colleges can still employ adjunct faculty for up to 29 hours per week.
Beyond this academic year, though, OU will either prevent adjunct professors from working 30 or more hours, or provide those who have been and will be working over the part-time limit with health insurance.
Either way, OU will have to closely monitor the number of hours adjunct professors are working when the act’s April 2014 deadline rolls around — an extension from the original January 2014 deadline, said Greg Fialko, OU’s senior human resources director.
Colleges will evaluate the necessity of employing part-time faculty more than 29 hours on an individual basis.
If those hours prove necessary, OU will provide them health care.
“If you’re pretty sure they’re going to work more than 30 hours a week, we’re going to give them healthcare,” he said.
While the administration is scrambling to provide healthcare for its employees working more than 29 hours, most OU student employees won’t even notice the effects.
OU Human Resources did make a decision for student employee hours, capping them at a maximum of 20 hours per week during the academic year and 28 hours during the summer — including government subsidized PACE and work-study positions, Fialko said.
In the past, students could work more than 40 hours during the summer if they weren’t taking classes at OU.
Previously during the academic year, students were limited to working 20 hours, but were hard to monitor if a student worked more than one job.
Of the roughly 200 students who work at Alden Library, most worked under the Federal Work Study limit anyway, said Eileen Theodore-Shusta, director of planning, assessment and organizational effectiveness at Alden.
The only way a student employed by the library could previously work more than 30 hours, Theodore-Shusta said, would be if they were employed by another facility on campus as well.
“That’s a concern that I think the whole university is struggling with,” she said. “Right now we’re so decentralized that each planning unit manages the hours people work for them and doesn’t really know what’s going on elsewhere.”
While OU currently plans to keep the Oracle system for hourly employment records, changes would be made to facilitate hourly tracking; however, without a decision in place, the university is still evaluating what changes might be made.
OU Human Resources, payroll and IT employees are meeting currently to evaluate how to track hours without upgrading or replacing its Oracle system, Fialko said.
“There is quite a strain on our Oracle payroll system,” he said. “We’re going to have to do a lot of work to make sure they can track accurately.”
The key to monitoring the number of hours employees work is informing the individual colleges, he said. Each college employs a number of adjunct professors based on the needs of the college, Frank said.
“If someone questions (the individual college) as to why this person isn’t being provided with health insurance, you need to answer with how many hours this person is working,” he said.
Frank said there would be a small number of adjunct faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences eligible for healthcare, but he said he assured Fialko that he would be willing to provide for those that do.
“We have to pretty much operate in the way we have in the past, and if people are entitled to their benefit I stand ready to provide them,” Frank said.
dk123111@ohiou.edu
@DanielleRose84
