ADJUNCT ACCOUNTING [Diverse Issues in Higher Education]
By Lesesne, Cherise | |
Proquest LLC |
Institutions react to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
With colleges and universities recruiting more adjunct professors, schools have been able to reduce the costly expenses of large salary and benefit packages that are typically associated with full-time employees. Yet, schools have started to re-evaluate their use of adjunct professors in order to comply with the Affordable Care Act (AC A), demanding that employers provide affordable health coverage for all of their full-time employees, which includes anyone working 30 hours or more.
Signed in 2010,
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Sebelius remarks, "That s what change looks like."
Although for higher education institutions, "change" appears in their redefined concept of a full-time worker. Faculty who typically work more than 30 hours are now able to take advantage of health insurance packages that adequately suit their health care needs, including those contingent faculty who dangle between the Unes of working 30 to 35 hours a week.
In public schools around the nation, two-thirds of the faculty consists of contingent instructors. As such, schools are under immense pressure to carve out room in their budgets to accommodate health coverage for all employees working more than 30 hours. However, the problem for schools is not merely in their hesitation to withhold money. For higher education institutions, a typical benefits package for a regular, full-time, employee can cost an additional 25 to 30 percent of the employees base salary. Several schools fighting the rising costs of higher education are not financially equipped to allocate that amount to each adjunct professor.
In order to ensure that higher education administrations are not compromising their budgets, the
Schools such as the
In a statement released by the college, President
Like Allegheny, the issue of funding will induce many higher education institutions to reconsider their employment tactics toward contingent faculty. According to
"I don't see this as much as institutions really not wanting to acknowledge those employees in a more substantial way; it's just that the budget constraints for those institutions are forcing them to make these decisions that in all likelihood, they really don't want to make," Brantley remarks, in response to the budgeting crisis.
Brantley notes that some colleges have chosen to increase class sizes in order to maintain regularity in their number of faculty employed. On the other hand, schools like CCAC considered different staffing models that engage adjunct faculty at a commitment with lower hours. In regard to exploring other practical methods to comply with such regulations, Brantley says, "There's not one particular option that is a win-win."
He further explains, "We would never want two employees to be performing the same duties and responsibilities, one receiving full benefits and the other not receiving the same benefit package."
If colleges were to consider the option of providing a massive workload on one professor, not only would this practice be unethical as Brantley says, but also, it could deteriorate the quality of education that adjunct instructors deliver.
In addition to the minimal resources allocated for adjunct faculty, the sourcing and hiring practices tend to be just as negligible when trying to recruit the much-needed staff. Maisto identifies a common practice upon higher education administration in hiring as the "just-in-time" employment, where schools inform their contingent faculty of their course load one or two weeks before the beginning of each academic term.
In some cases, schools have even cut an entire course taught by adjunct professors in order to accommodate a class taught by a tenure-line faculty member. In both situations, faculty members are forced to prepare hurried course curricula, as their time is uncompensated.
With the new legislation influencing schools to cut even more hours and to trim off even more from professor's salaries, adjunct instructors are beginning to consider taking on multiple teaching jobs in order to compensate for their lower payments.
However, as the ACA regulations don't officially become effective until
Copyright: | (c) 2012 Cox, Matthews & Associates, Inc. |
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