Stef Gray, like many recent graduates, is struggling to repay her college loans.

Gray, who took out federal student loans through lender corporation Sallie Mae while attending Hunter College in New York, had trouble finding a job after graduating last May and has since been paying the price.

Sallie Mae charged Gray $150 every three months on federal loans, as it does for all unemployed students who are in forbearance, or taking a formal break from repayment. The fee was not counted toward paying down the balance of her loans.

Angered by the extra fee, Gray created a petition on Change.org, a social activism site, entitled, “Calling on Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord to stop charging forbearance fees to unemployed students wishing to avoid default.” Her appeal was answered last week when the lending body said the charge will now work as a credit toward the loan payment due.

Sallie Mae is the largest secondary market for student loans in the country, meaning the company buys loans from original lenders, like banks, which can use the capital from those transactions to offer loans to other borrowers. Sallie Mae had a total loan portfolio of $35.8 billion last July, according to the Washington Business Journal.

Associate Vice President for Student Financial Assistance Dan Small said it would not be uncommon for GW’s undergraduate students to take out loans with Sallie Mae, but he declined to estimate how many students use the company.

In the 2009 to 2010 academic year, GW students took out $31 million in student loans with various companies, while their parents signed for an additional $23 million in loans, according to internal data.

Gray amassed about $40,000 in debt with the financial company, which topped $65,000 in total expenses after interest payments.

The petition garnered more than 111,000 signatures since November, and Feb. 2, Gray presented the signatures to Sallie Mae at its D.C. office.

“All I want is for Sallie Mae to offer the same provisions for its private student loan debtors as it does free of charge for its federal student loan debtors, and so do the 76,000 people standing with me who have signed my petition on Change.org,” Gray said in a speech before presenting the signatures to Sallie Mae.

Shortly after receiving the petition, Sallie Mae announced the same day that it would revoke the fee, which the company’s spokeswoman Patricia Christel previously told The Hatchet was a “good faith deposit.”

Gray criticized the financial company for calling the charge a “deposit.”

“When you put down a deposit for something, that means that the money is going to come back to you. Like a deposit on your apartment – provided you don’t set your apartment on fire – it will come back to you. This is not a deposit,” she said.

In response to the petition, Sallie Mae will now credit the customer’s balance for the fees after resuming regular payments. Refunding the fee will begin retroactively, so the new policy will be applied to anyone who has incurred the fee since Jan. 1.

But Gray told the Associated Press Friday that she was unsatisfied with the new credit policy and that she wants Sallie Mae to drop the charge altogether. She did not return requests for comment after Sallie Mae announced the new policy.

She hopes that her petition can start to change the national dialogue about student debt.

“Right now, the national dialogue focuses on blaming the victims for the student debt crisis,” Gray said. “The focus needs to be on the lenders themselves and the laws that they shaped and the lack of consumer protection.”