At the very least, students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln threw away $1,084,162.13 last semester by dropping classes. In the fall, UNL students received 4,163 ‘W’s on their transcripts. This means the students dropped their courses after September 6 and could only get 50 percent of their tuition money back. If the student waited even longer to drop the course, he or she may not have gotten any money back. So students could have spent up to $2,168,324.25 last fall on classes they didn’t finish. And that’s just for in-state students. This extra tuition money just goes into the general tuition fund and isn’t dealt with any differently, said Earl Hawkey, director of Registration and Records at UNL. ‘Hopefully students weren’t dropping classes for trivial reasons,’ Hawkey said. ‘If the reason you’re dropping the class is because you’re really getting a bad grade, of course you want to drop it.’ Not everyone has the same experience ‘- even in the same class, he said. If students aren’t fully prepared for a class or end up having problems outside of class or in other classes, that may prompt them to drop a class. Hawkey also pointed out that UNL has a fairly lenient policy regarding withdrawals. Some universities, including the University of Washington, have a limit on how many classes a student can drop, he said. Erika Quechenberger, a freshman advertising major, has never dropped a class. Some of her friends have dropped, though, she said. While she would consider dropping a class in a dire situation, Quechenberger said she wouldn’t like having to do so. ‘I think dropping a class is such a huge waste of money,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’d want to do that.’ Caroline Haug realizes it was a waste to drop her chemistry class but said her GPA is more important. Haug, a sophomore animal science major, is planning to go to graduate school and become a veterinarian, so maintaining a pristine transcript is essential, she said. ‘Going into it (chemistry), the class was a lot tougher than I expected,’ she said. ‘I was frustrated, yes ‘hellip; but in the end getting the money back was secondary to saving my GPA.’