Although what you see of colleges in the movies may have you believe that classes there are just like they are in high school, they are absolutely not the same. Although college as portrayed in the movies often conveys the sense of people always going to classes, most colleges in real life are quite different.
Instead of having classes throughout the entire day, most students have only 3 or 4 classes throughout the day. This means only about a few hours of class in a single day, which is completely different from high school where you were in some sort of class for nearly the full 7 or 8 hours while you were at school. Plus, instead of having class for 5 days a week, you very well could end up with an entire weekday without a single class at all. Granted it doesn’t happen all the time, but even having just one class on a given weekday is fairly common and still feels vastly different from your typical day of high school. In essence, more often than not, college students spend more time engaging in non-educational activities compared to actually going to class or studying.
However, you could end up with a fairly loaded class schedule, even when in college. However, this typically means that you are going over the recommended credits for a single semester or quarter. This sort of schedule is not common in the slightest, but even for those who have this sort of schedule, it is definitely manageable, simply because it is already quite so comparable to your workload while you were in high school.
In addition to the general amount of class you will have during the week, it is also important to discuss what type of classes you end up taking. And the truth is, that you can literally take whatever classes you want to take. There is almost a complete degree of freedom to which you can select your classes for any given semester or quarter, ranging from classes that are within your major, to classes that simply pique your interest, to other classes that perhaps fall more under the extra-curricular category more than anything (yet still counting for credits).
While this may all sound pretty awesome on the surface, it is important to keep in mind one crucial thing: you are here to get your degree. Basically if you aren’t taking enough classes that help you fulfill your degree requirements, you are slowly but surely delaying your degree in the long-run. And while it might seem like having an easy semester or quarter full of fun classes may be a good idea, going overboard will send you down a path where you end up being short of the required amount of credits to get your degree when your 4 years are up. And that all but forces you to take more classes in the summer or even worse, take on another semester or quarter of college. Not only is that a huge waste of your time, but a huge waste of you (or your parents’ money) as well.
So in short, there is a lot of freedom given to you when it comes to designing your class schedule. In most cases you end up with a lot more free time than you did while in high school. However, it is important to make sure that you always remain on track to get your degree, as that is the reason you went to college to begin with. Keep that one small thing in mind and at that point however you decide to design your schedule is totally up to you. Making it fun and not overly full, while still allowing yourself to learn as much as possible is the best way to go about doing it!