The Obama administration has announced that it will delay the employer coverage mandate in Obamacare until 2015. What does that mean for higher education?

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports.

An Extra Year

The surprising announcement Tuesday that the Obama administration is delaying for one year — until 2015 — a key requirement of the landmark health care law could reopen discussions of the limits many colleges have been placing on adjunct hours.

A key provision in the Affordable Care Act — which had been scheduled to take effect at the start of 2014 — would have required large employers (a group into which almost all colleges fall) to provide health coverage for those who work at least 30 hours a week, or else to pay fines. Starting in in the fall of 2012, colleges started to limit the hours of adjuncts (many of whom aren’t covered by institutions’ health plans) to avoid having to provide coverage to them. College officials have said that it would be too expensive to do so.

The trend has been particularly evident at community colleges, many of which have a high degree of reliance on adjunct teaching. Many adjuncts have reported new rules on how many courses they can teach, and new efforts to define how many hours adjuncts work (beyond those in the classroom). The bottom line for many adjuncts has been to find out that they are not only not getting health insurance; they are losing sections they had hoped to teach (and that they needed to teach to balance their personal budgets).

Steven M. Bloom, director of federal relations at the American Council on Education, said Tuesday night that he did not know how colleges would respond to the extra year they now have. “It will be a surprise to them,” he said.

Further, he noted that the Obama administration has yet to issue detailed guidance on the delay or on issues related to how colleges should count adjunct hours.