The way colleges count adjuncts’ workloads is important not only for determining whether they are eligible for health insurance under the new health-care law but also for their participation in some other federal programs.
A federal student-loan-forgiveness program uses the same 30-hour benchmark as the health-care law for determining full-time employment, a key requirement for eligibility. And at least one adjunct is having trouble qualifying because the colleges she teaches for are reluctant to certify how many hours an adjunct like her works.
Heidi Petersen, an adjunct based in Colorado who teaches online courses in ethics for two institutions, has struggled to get administrators to complete paperwork in which they must calculate and certify the average number of hours she works each week. She needs that paperwork to get confirmation from the U.S. Department of Education that she qualifies for a loan-forgiveness program for people who work for public-service organizations. Most nonprofit colleges count as public-service employers under the rules for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.
“The certification paperwork asks how many hours per week does this person work, and that’s the question that trips everyone up,” said Ms. Petersen, who teaches two online courses for National University and one course at Front Range Community College, where she also works three hours each week as a consultant for the institution’s writing center. By her calculations, which date to 2009 and include the time she has spent in work-related conferences and various mandatory training sessions, she has worked at least 30 hours a week, and possibly more, between the two institutions.
“I’ve been trying for a year to pin this down,” she said, “and I’m getting nowhere.”
For Ms. Petersen, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 and a master’s degree in applied philosophy from Bowling Green State University in 1994, the stakes are high: Her student-loan debt totals about $138,000.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, created by Congress in 2007, applies to direct federal loans and direct consolidation loans of other types of federal loans. To qualify for loan forgiveness, borrowers have to first make 10 years of loan payments, beginning after October 1, 2007. At the same time, they must be working full time—at least 30 hours per week—for a public-service organization.
People like Ms. Petersen, who have more than one employer, are allowed to total the average number of hours worked per week at each workplace to arrive at the required hours. If they are under contract for at least eight months, they must work an average of 30 hours per week during that period.
New Attention to Adjuncts
Ms. Petersen has encountered roadblocks in trying to get her work hours documented as administrators’ counting of adjuncts’ time on the job is taking on greater significance.
In some cases, college officials are responding more carefully to requests for documentation of hours because of the new health law, the Affordable Care Act. Starting next year, that law will require employers to provide health benefits to all employees who work at least 30 hours a week. Some institutions have already cut back on the number of courses adjuncts may teach to avoid triggering the health-benefit requirement.
The Internal Revenue Service is collecting comments from higher-education associations, higher-education unions, and adjunct advocacy groups on proposed rules for how adjuncts’ work hours should be calculated.
Ms. Petersen, who has taught at Front Range since the fall of 2009, e-mailed human-resource officials there this month to ask if they would verify, at least in a letter, how many courses she has taught each academic year at the institution. She also wanted the college to use the Education Department’s official certification form for the loan-forgiveness program to state how many hours she has worked as a writing-center consultant.
She received an e-mail reply, which she shared with The Chronicle, in which a college administrator wrote that he was “not comfortable making assumptions on hours worked in regard to the ratio of prep and teaching time to hours worked.” The administrator said he was waiting for a decision from the community-college system’s office on how such calculations should be made.
Rhonda Bentz, director of media and legislative communications for the Colorado Community College system, said that a system-level committee is discussing the issue while awaiting a ruling from the IRS.
National University, a nonprofit institution based in California that also offers online programs, eventually provided her with a letter that simply noted how many courses she had taught, she said. Ms. Petersen has taught for National since the spring of 2011.
A spokesman from National didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Looking for Guidance
Borrowers seeking loan forgiveness under the public-service program can’t actually qualify for it until October 2017 because of the required 120 months of repayment. But they need to keep records until then to document that they have met the employment and other eligibility requirements.
The Department of Education uses its employment-certification forms to help it track whether borrowers who may eventually apply for loan forgiveness are on track to meet the eligibility requirements. Without documentation on the official certification form, Ms. Petersen said, she’s not sure whether she will be able to participate in the program.
“I don’t know if any of my work is going to count,” she said.
Ms. Petersen has already qualified for an income-based repayment plan that allows her to skip making loan payments because her income is so meager. Under that program, her remaining debt would be forgiven after 25 years—more than double the time period under the public-service program. “Should I be teaching more classes?” she asked. “I don’t know. All I really want to be able to do is to figure out what I need to be doing in order to qualify.”
Ms. Petersen said she hopes the Department of Education will issue clearer guidance on how colleges should count hours.
“When I look at this Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, I can’t see how they wouldn’t expect that people getting advanced degrees might get caught up in the adjunct system,” Ms. Petersen said. “It’s very surprising to me that they haven’t come up with a way to say that if you’re teaching a certain amount of courses a year at a postsecondary institution, then that would work.”
Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, an adjunct advocacy group, said that the Department of Education and the IRS should “get together and realize that they’re dealing with the same issue here.”
“This represents a real opportunity,” she added, “to educate both agencies on the realities of adjuncts’ work conditions.”
