It looks like staff members at one Colorado college are more Obamacare victims.

Colorado Mountain College is prohibiting part-time faculty from working more than 30 hours per week to avoid the Obamacare mandate to provide part-time employees with health insurance, the Aspen Daily News reports:

The school relies heavily on adjuncts — there are only 112 full-time faculty employed across its 11 college campuses — and administrators say insuring everyone who works more than 30 hours per week would be prohibitively expensive.

Instead, the school has limited adjuncts to teaching no more than nine credit hours per semester, which translates to about 27 hours per week assuming a ratio of two hours of preparation time for every hour spent in the classroom. Previously, adjuncts were limited to teaching 11 credit hours per semester, a workload of about 33 hours per week on average.

The full Aspen Daily News story offers some additional, troubling information:

Among U.S. colleges, CMC is far from unique in capping adjunct hours to avoid a jump in healthcare costs: According to the education news website Inside Higher Ed, colleges across the country have been doing so in droves.

“I’ve heard that hundreds of colleges have done this but I’d say it’s very safe to say dozens,” Colleen Flaherty, a reporter for the website Inside Higher Ed who has written about how U.S. colleges are reacting to the ACA, wrote in an e-mail.

The attempts of American colleges to limit their exposure to the ACA have drawn the ire of teachers’ unions and faculty advocacy groups nationwide. The American Association of University Professors, which represents college faculty, posted the following strongly worded statement on its website last April in response to news of colleges capping adjunct hours:

“We have been dismayed by news reports of a handful of colleges and universities that have threatened to cut the course loads of part-time faculty members specifically in order to evade this provision of the law. Such actions are reprehensible, penalizing part-time faculty members both by depriving them access to affordable health care as intended by law and by reducing their income.”

The Aspen Daily News could not find a CMC adjunct professor willing to comment on the record for this story. One adjunct confirmed that their hours had been capped, but declined to speak on the record because they don’t want to endanger their chances of earning a full-time position at the college.