By: Sarah Sarway

While hundreds of thousands of people struggle to pay back their student debt, over 100 Sallie Mae executives and sales team members spent a week sunbathing in Hawaii, NBC News reported.

The company decided to celebrate its record-breaking year of $5 billion in student loans to 374,000 borrowers by taking their employees to the Fairmont on Wailea Beach in Maui, Hawaii. While the company covered all the costs for their team, family members were invited to tag along on the employees expense. “We said, ‘Hey, look, Maui is a pretty nice spot.’ And so if you wanted to stay a few days or want to bring family, that’s up to you,” said Sallie Mae CEO Ray Quinlan in an interview during the trip with NBC News.

Quinlan went on to explain that the trip was “recognition of the hard work” done by the sales team and was nothing out-of-the ordinary. The CEO said that the lender has been running retreats like these since its establishment in the 1970s.

While Sallie Mae’s team may have been treated to five days in paradise, their borrowers haven’t been experiencing the same dose of sunshine. Since its founding in the 1970s, the lender started to offer private loans and created Navient to service and collect loans (including ones provided by Sallie Mae).

Many of Sallie Mae’s borrowers have complained of confusion and mistreatment they received from Navient, suggesting that their initial borrowing process and communication with the Sallie Mae salespeople were more pleasant than the newer offshoot company.

Borrower Paige McDaniel told NBC that she had to declare bankruptcy after taking out a $120,000 student loan for grad school. McDaniel was forced to pay $1,500 a month. “When I told them that, you know, I couldn’t afford that, could we make some payment arrangements, they essentially said, ‘So sorry, we’ll put a lien on your house and garnish your wages if you don’t make those payments,’” she told NBC.

The interest began to pile up and McDaniel is now in debt to the lender for a total of $304,000. “There’s no way anybody can ever dig themselves out from underneath that,” she told NBC. “It’s not just my generation cause I have the loans, it affects my children.”

Sallie Mae and Navient were sued by the attorney general of Illinois in 2017 for “deceptive subprime lending, a failure to offer proper repayment options, and faulty collection practices,” according to NBC, but the former said they are not liable in the claim. In a statement to NBC, Sallie Mae claimed that they are a separate and independent company from Navient, who they call responsible for all liabilities.

In response, Navient told the news company that the suit is baseless. “The company insisted all loans were issued in “good faith,’” writes NBC.