Usually below 12 credits is part-time, and 12 or above is full-time. How many classes that comes out to depends on the amount of credits per class. That’s assuming this is on a semester system and requires 120 credits to graduate. You need to check with your college to see what is considered full time.
Well, it’s not so much classes as it is credit hours. For most colleges, 12 credits per semester is full time, while 15 credits is the average/recommended. It just depends on how many credits each course has, and it typically ends up being 3-5 classes per semester for a full time student.
In the typical credit hour system, 12 credits is typically the minimum per semester to be “full time” for financial aid purposes. However, 15 or 16 is what one typically needs to average to graduate in 8 semesters, since a total of 120 to 128 credits is needed for graduation. Schools which use this system may have courses with different numbers of credits, most commonly 3 to 5 credits per course.
Of course, schools may count credits differently. For example, a school may have 1 course = 1 credit, with 32 credits needed to graduate. This means that one needs to average 4 courses = 4 credits per semester to graduate in 8 semesters, although it is possible that 3 courses = 3 credits may remain full time for financial aid purposes.
For each school, check its policies carefully on these matters, just in case it differs.
A part time student is one who takes a course load less than what is defined as “full time” at the school.