<p> The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, ACA) stipulates a full-time employee, defined as one who works an average at least 30 hours per week, merits a prescribed set of insurance benefits. Higher education institutions must determine whether a part-time employee meets the ACA definition of a full-time employee by calculating the average weekly working hours. Although challenges exist when defining and measuring academic instructional work, the purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the effect of various workload formulas as a means to measure the average weekly working hours of part-time faculty and to compare the results to the ACA definition of a full-time employee. The results, grounded in the Parametric Estimating Model framework, indicated that if the ACA was in effect in FY2013 several part-time faculty members met the ACA definition of full-time employee at one institution when utilizing workload formulas as a means to measure instructional work. The three common salient characteristics of these part-time faculty members include that they were either potentially loaded greater than 50% of a full-time faculty workload, reported excessive hourly-compensated work, or worked during the summer term. An organization risks the potential financial penalty of $2,000 annually for each full-time employee employed when an ACA defined full-time employee is not offered healthcare benefits. Therefore, the study recommends that the organization create methods to control and monitor hourly work and course assignments particularly of those offered in the summer term in order to avoid the risk of the ACA penalty or alternatively, provide access to healthcare coverage that meets the ACA requirements to its part-time employees. Part-time employees, including part-time faculty play a critical and important role for institutions of higher education.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3705734 |
| Date | 02 July 2015 |
| Creators | Reimer, Denise M. |
| Publisher | Edgewood College |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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