Myron McDonald, 20, has a 2-year-old son, an off-campus apartment, and a tuition bill commensurate with his full-time course load at La Sierra University, a private institution in Southern California affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
He had a full-time job in the cafeteria to help him shoulder those expenses, until a university rule established in February limited student employees to no more than 25 hours of work a week during the academic year. Now, as fall approaches, he’s hustling to find an off-campus job and worrying about how the new policy might restrict his family’s budget.
“I don’t want to have my son say, ‘Daddy, I need this,’ and I can’t be the one to provide it for him,” says Mr. McDonald, who makes the state minimum wage of $9 an hour. “I would feel like I’m not a good father.”
La Sierra is one of many colleges that have capped on-campus work hours in recent months. The reason: the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Beginning in 2015, the law will require businesses with more than 99 employees to provide health insurance to at least 70 percent of their workers who log 30 hours a week or more. That number jumps to 95 percent in 2016. In anticipation of this mandate and its costs, a number of colleges are scrambling to keep student workers—undergraduate and graduate—under the 30-hour threshold, leaving some, like Mr. McDonald, in the lurch.
But a rule change may be on the horizon. Late last month, two Republican lawmakers proposed nearly identical bills that would exempt universities from the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate in the case of “full-time students.” In a news release issued July 30, U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, from North Carolina, said his bill, the Student Worker Exemption Act of 2014, would “prevent colleges and universities from having to cut student work hours under the ACA and will allow students to continue to support themselves and their educational aspirations.” The other bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Michael Turner, from Ohio, states a similar rationale.
Mr. Turner says the issue came to his attention when his daughter, a student at Miami University, in Ohio, was told she would have to limit her working hours because of the Affordable Care Act. “I think this is one of the unintended consequences that the administration did not foresee—having students lose the ability to offset the cost of their education,” Mr. Turner says. “It’s just basically wrong.”
Mr. Meadows’s bill has nine cosponsors—including two Democrats—and the support of the higher-education establishment. Last Wednesday the American Council on Education offered its endorsement in a letter cosigned by seven other organizations. “Schools are already under budgetary restraints,” the letter reads. “As a result, the mandate could force institutions to choose between ensuring that some needy students have sufficient work opportunities to pay for school versus limiting student work hours to avoid additional health-insurance costs.”
David O. Belcher, chancellor of Western Carolina University and the administrator who persuaded Mr. Meadows to propose the legislation, puts it bluntly. “We don’t have the funding to cover insurance for student workers,” he says.
The bill purports to shield the most vulnerable students from a vital cut in working hours. Below the surface, it is yet another volley in the continuing battle to define the nature of student work and who exactly counts as an employee on today’s college campus.
‘A Crystal-Ball Exercise’
Colleges across the country have been trying to answer that question ever since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010. Over the past year in particular, many institutions have re-examined their student-work policies while trying to calculate the financial hit they might incur if those policies stood pat. And the arithmetic isn’t simple. Many students already have insurance through their parents and can choose to remain on their parents’ plans through age 26, thanks to another provision in the Affordable Care Act. It’s near-impossible to know how many student workers would make the switch to university insurance if given the option.
The University of Kansas hired consultants to help its leaders determine how many of its 5,000 student workers would qualify as full-time employees under the Affordable Care Act, how many would purchase the university’s insurance plan if given the choice, and how much all that would cost.
“It’s kind of a crystal-ball exercise,” says Ola Faucher, the university’s director of human resources. She adds, “If we had a solid, predictive model it’d be easier to gauge the impact.”
Ms. Faucher says that the cost to Kansas would have been $5,000 to $6,000 for each student choosing university insurance, and that the total price tag for the university could have been in the millions. As a result, Kansas announced in August that it would limit student workers to 20 hours of work a week during the academic year and 40 hours a week in the summer. In combination, the two caps will keep students under the 1,560-hour yearly threshold that triggers full-time status.
Wright State University, in Ohio, made a similar move upon discovering that about 200 of its 2,000 student workers would have qualified for health insurance. “We had no budget for that,” says Dan Abrahamowicz, vice president for student affairs. “So we had to make some adjustments.” As of this May, students can no longer work more than 28 hours a week.
Wright State also had to devise a new method for tracking student employment since certain campus workers, such as resident advisers and newspaper staff, were not compensated at an hourly rate. Those students will now have to clock in and out using a software system that will warn them when they are approaching the 28-hour limit.
Numerous studies suggest college students are working more now than ever. About 20 percent of the nation’s 19.7 million undergraduates work full-time, year-round according to a 2012 report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Figures released in 2009 by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics show that the percentage of full-time college students working more than 20 hours a week has been climbing since 1970.
Traditionally, student work has been viewed as a supplement to the academic experience and a way for students seeking financial aid to support themselves. Laura W. Perna, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and editor of the book Understanding the Working College Student (Stylus Publishing, 2010), says students who work 10 to 15 hours a week on campus do better academically and graduate at higher rates than their peers.
Students working more than that, however, tend to suffer, which is why a number of universities already set a limit of 20 hours a week. Ms. Perna says a bill protecting student workers who log more than 30 hours a week should raise eyebrows. “It really should make us think, ‘What is a student if they’re working more than 30 hours per week?’”
Student vs. Worker
To take that question a step further: Are workers still students if, like Mr. McDonald, they are putting in long hours at campus jobs that have no clear connection to their academic pursuits? In terms of value provided to the university, what distinguishes a student worker from nonstudent colleagues? When is labor simply labor?
“It just seems wrong,” says Ms. Perna. “If someone is working 30 hours per week, they’re a full-time employee and they should get the benefits of being a full-time employee.”
Many college leaders say there is a fundamental difference between work performed by a student and work performed by anyone else, even if the tasks are identical. “It has to do with the nature of student employment,” says Mr. Abrahamowicz. “It’s meant to supplement. We see it as a form of engagement with the collegiate experience.”
Steven M. Bloom, director of federal relations for the American Council on Education, agrees. “What they’re engaged in is really part of their academic program,” he says. “It’s the same reason we don’t believe graduate students should be organized. We don’t think they’re employees. They’re students. At the core of what they do is an academic activity.”
A similar logic prevails in the NCAA’s opposition to athletes forming unions, yet another front where university administrators are looking to define students as something other than regular employees.
Mr. Bloom acknowledges that the line between student work and regular work blurs when considering cafeteria jobs like Mr. McDonalds’s, but that forcing universities to provide insurance for such students will only hurt them—especially since the insurance itself would be redundant for those under 26 who are already covered under their parents’ plans.
“All we’re saying is that the status quo works,” Mr. Bloom says. “Why should we change the status quo on this issue?”