EAST LANSING, MI (WSYM) - — Some students and families at Michigan State University are upset with the school's plan to have classes online for the fall semester.
Sarah, a parent of a junior at MSU said half of her son's classes for the fall will be online.
She said her son is thinking about not returning for the fall semester because he wants to avoid online classes.
During the pandemic, MSU converted to online classes only.
Recently, the university sent out a letter informing MSU students that they will have hybrid classes this fall, which is a mix of in-person and online learning.
Families were hopeful their children would be able to receive an education in the classroom and not through their computers.
However, some students have a large amount of classes that will be held online and not in-person.
Carol whose son is currently enrolled at MSU is also thinking about taking next semester off.
Carol said, "It's not the quality, it's not the rigor you expect in a university. You just didn't get it online. There's no dynamic interaction or interpersonal skills developed. You couldn't have a study group effectively. He's in engineering and he worked on a team and he couldn't really meet with his team. So it defied everything they were suppose to gain in that educational process."
Some parents said if the students are allowed to live on campus in the fall they should be able to go into their classrooms as well.
Sarah said, "How can you ethically open dorms? Kids get sick there all the times and yet not have small classrooms and have it online."
Carol said she thinks the small classrooms will be safer than the dorms.
She said, "They're going to have dynamic relationships inside the dorms day or night. I think that it's kind of foolish we think that we're going to have social distance inside the dorms but we're going to keep these online classes because we're going to keep them safer."
FOX 47 News spoke with a senior at Michigan State who is studying pre-med.
She said she's going to find it difficult to complete her lab courses online.
Lauren Jernstadt MSU student said,"They'll basically be doing demonstrations of how you use an EKG or use something like your respiration rate. We're mainly going to focus on an abstract on an experiment we would like to do and then also grant proposals like doing the research behind it and trying to get a grant for our project basically."
The start of the semester is September 2.
