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  • "I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance"

    By Dean Dad February 11, 2008 11:11 pm

    As a political liberal -- and proud of it, thank you very much -- I believe that it's immoral for a wealthy country to leave tens of millions of its own without health insurance.

    That said, I find myself in the weird position of making decisions that effectively deny some people coverage. And I'm not even talking about adjuncts, a topic that has been amply covered here and elsewhere.

    I'm talking about students.

    Every single semester I get students registering late, or trying not to get dropped, making the argument that they need the class to stay on their parents' health insurance.

    This strikes me as somewhat less drastic than the old "I need a C or I'll get drafted" of Vietnam days, but still disconcerting. Given the number of students with chronic conditions - whether it be asthma, or ADHD, or diabetes, or whatever - a cavalier "well,who cares, they're young and healthy" really doesn't cut it. Besides, having young and healthy people paying into the insurance pool (whether directly or indirectly) actually lowers costs for the rest of us.

    A fair number of health insurance plans, I'm told, will cover dependents in their late teens and early twenties, as long as they have 'full-time student' status. In concrete terms, that means they need to be registered for at least twelve credits.

    Some students (and, presumably, parents) have figured out that it's cheaper to pay tuition for an extra class or two than to try to buy individual coverage. (This is particularly true at cc tuition levels, and even more so when they can get financial aid for the tuition.) So they do, often with little or no intention of taking the actual course (or of taking it seriously). I've had multiple conversations with students at the last possible moment to register, desperately looking for an available slot in any course at all - they really don't care - just to hit that magic "12" number. They're working part-time at low-paying jobs that don't offer insurance; they'd rather come here part time, too. But the material incentives strongly favor full-time status. I get more of these awkward conversations when the midterm warnings go out, telling students that they'll be dropped for non-attendance. They don't dispute the fact of non-attendance; instead they make a humanitarian plea not to effectively deny them health insurance.

    Yuck, yuck, yuck.

    Reason #396 to support single-payer health care: it would decouple 'full-time student' status from health insurance. I don't want people making academic decisions - whether it's students or me personally - based on health insurance. I don't want to choose between upholding our academic standards and cutting off some kid from the medical care he needs.

    I've never knowingly been a party to insurance fraud. If the student didn't follow the rules for registering, I don't make exceptions based on my willingness to divert some miniscule fraction of an HMO's profits. But I've certainly seen students register, um, let's go with *halfheartedly*.

    As an open-admissions college, there's no way to prevent that. Most students register online anyway, so even if I wanted to be a one-man Attitude Police, I couldn't. (And folks seeking health insurance certainly have no monopoly on shaky attitudes.)

    But there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards people taking that extra class just to get the insurance. I don't entirely blame them for doing it - they've found a loophole in a ridiculously unfair system - but it certainly distorts what we're trying to do. These folks show up in our attrition numbers, our outcomes assessments, and our (non)-graduation rates, all of which get blamed on us. And they get lower GPA's than they probably ought, simply from spreading themselves unrealistically thin.

    Other than supporting single-payer, I don't have a clean answer to this one. This probably isn't as common at the elite schools, given their tuition levels, so it mostly escapes media notice. But in my neck of the academic woods, this is very real, and very messed up.

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Comments on "I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance"

  • Health insurance
  • Posted by Judith on February 12, 2008 at 9:30am EST

  • I've long said that if I had the power to change one thing about colleges, it would be a change to this ridiculous law.

    I've even told students that I will leave them on the class list until the end of the semester and then give them a W at the end, so they can maintain the full-time status and not affect their gpa with an F.

    I don't think it's a good answer.

  • Posted by RJW on February 12, 2008 at 11:35am EST

  • Problems such as this, relative to maintaining health insurance, should not be susceptible to any administrative flexibility toward mitigating the student's plight. A mid-term "warning" for non-attendance is in itself a defective policy that should rightly be corrected by inclusion within the satisfactory academic progress (SAP) policy, along with such other revisions as to preclude a "W" in place of an "F" grade. Well intentioned actions such as those described do do more harm to academic integrity and the important work that dedicated educators can achieve with serious students who are not playing the system with our sympathies.

  • But look at the bright side
  • Posted by Bill Melater on February 12, 2008 at 2:15pm EST

  • At my cc, we have many students who carry full-time loads strictly for insurance reasons. I've known some who admitted that they enrolled in the first place to stay on Mom's or Dad's health insurance. If a student gets all the financial aid and tuition assistance he or she can, buys some books used, and doesn't buy other books at all, failing eight or ten classes can seem less expensive than paying for health insurance for a year.

    As you note, the situation is hardly a recipe for academic success.

    But let's look at the bright side. Students who enroll in classes just to stay on a parent's insurance policy, and who have little interest in learning anything in those classes, do not demand much from the school's resources. They rarely use the library, the open computer labs, the writing center, and so forth. They are paying customers who don't require the entire product. If they weren't here, or if they cut back to two classes a semester, the school's FTE enrollment and revenue would drop. Reduced revenue could well mean tighter budgets, fewer facilities, and fewer full-time instructors, which would harm all students and reduce student success.

    Thus the health-care system induces some people unwittingly to subsidize the education and employment of others. It's the good old Invisible Hand at work again.

    (Note to the sarcasm-challenged: I don't mean it. But if we did the math, I bet we'd find that I'm not wrong by much.)

  • Posted by Cynical Adjunct on February 12, 2008 at 9:25pm EST

  • And what about the potential drain on the underpaid adjunct?

    What classes are Sally Uninsured and her peers taking for those extra classes? The entry level ones taught by adjuncts.

    But, you say, isn't this one less [or five less] students to have to teach and grade, thus easing the burden on the underpaid adjunct?

    Maybe. But that's only if the insurance frauds NEVER come to class, never hand in work, never make any demands on time.

    But they often do all those things. Those mid-semester grade reports warning of failure for nonattendance? They often inspire a "good effort" on the student's part to "catch up," especially if mommy and daddy catch wind of the imminent failure [and the "wasted money"].

    What gets produced is often a big load of crap because the student has missed 50% or more the class is often incapable of catching up on assignments and then comes a-begging for a D.

    Let's be clear: The students we're discussing have NO intention to attend class. They simply want administration to avert their eyes as they fill class rosters that could be filled by students who want to take the class. They are siphoning off loan and grant funds from students who want to be there full-time and succeed at ALL the classes they enroll in [however they personally define success].

    But to simply enroll in a course in order to qualify for health insurance is to be a parasite on the system, to abuse public (and perhaps private) funds, and to diminish the educational opportunities of others. And, as I said earlier, I do believe it is fraud too.

    Why do bleeding hearts always feel bad for the wrong people? If you want to feel sorry for someone, instead of helping an adult child continue to feed off their extended adolescence by pretending to be full-time students when they clearly are not, why don't you PAY YOUR ADJUNCTS MORE MONEY!!!

    Better yet, just give the adjuncts free health insurance. Wouldn't that be deliciously ironic?

  • Posted by Greg on February 13, 2008 at 10:35am EST

  • your students have not learned how to play the game yet. The key here is that insurance companies want the student to enroll or register for 12 credits. They do not have to complete 12 credits, teach students to take advantage of your drop and add policies.

  • Faculty, Too
  • Posted by Marc Bousquet , author, How the University Works, at Santa Clara University on February 13, 2008 at 12:25pm EST

  • This may be a little late to get in on this extremely important conversation.

    crossposted from http://howtheuniversityworks.com

    In a couple of recent posts, I raised questions about the Democratic candidates' health plans--Obama's really won't cover many people and Clinton's enthusiastically endorses tiering of care.

    As we move closer to the likelihood of an Obama presidency, isn't it time to start moving the candidate toward repairing the shortcomings of his health-care plan?

    His plan is simply unlikely to do much for faculty serving contingently, such as Nancy Welch's colleague at the University of Vermont, who

    "has taught in the English department since 2000. Most often, he's been given three courses each semester. But UVM calls him 'part-time,' which means that he isn't eligible for UVM's health insurance plan.

    "As a result, he pays $356 each month for an individual insurance plan, with a deductible of up to $18,750 a year. He also has cancer and has just gone through a second round of chemotherapy, for which each infusion carried a bill of $8,200. At this point, he's teaching literally to save his life--to pay these medical bills."

    http://www.socialistworker.org/2008-1/662/662_04_UVM.shtml

    While Welch doesn't hold UVM administrators responsible for rising health care costs, she holds them responsible for raising their own wages and spending on facilities while "consistently, increasingly and, I believe, deliberately underemploying the faculty."

  • Part Time/Full Time Status
  • Posted by LInda on March 14, 2008 at 3:00pm EDT

  • I hear you all about students who want to stay on parent's insurance so they sign up for a class with no intentions to complete...But what about the ones (I'm sure my daughter is not the only one) who has a learning disability and the school has recommended through the office of accomindations that she only take 9 credit hours but she has been denied insurance saying she is not FULL TIME she tried that last semester and failed....too much work for her...she doesn't believe in just not trying for a subject....no insurance is not an option either....she has seizures and needs her medication....she is able to learn, it will just take more time for her than some....any suggestions??? She just wants to get an assocaties degree....at least she is trying to improve her life and not trying to live on the government! HELP!!

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