From the time he was a child, Dennis Brown always had dreams of someday becoming a surgeon. Back then, he would insist on being the neighborhood doctor, pretending to operate on his classmates during playtime at school.
“A lot of people say they want to be a doctor because it’s almost the expected thing to say,” he says. “But I really saw myself in the emergency room, wanting to help people. It’s something that I used to think about all of the time.”
But three years after graduating from college, Brown, 25, has made a decision that has even baffled his parents: he’s opted to remain in the working world and not attend medical school, putting his plans of becoming a physician on hold—perhaps indefinitely.
“I have so many loans from my undergraduate years, and the cost of medical school is simply too much,” Brown says matter-of-factly. “I’m not trying to be in debt for the rest of my life. I want to get married someday and not saddle my family with that kind of pressure.”
The first in his family to go to college, Brown is already burdened with nearly $40,000 in loans from his undergraduate years. Adding more debt on top of the interest that he already owes isn’t something that the Cleveland native is able to stomach.
“If I had the money, I would have tons of other options,” he says. “But I have to be sensible about my financial situation. I don’t want to be in debt for the rest of my life.”
Brown’s sentiments may partially explain why the percentage of African-American students enrolled in medical schools across the country has fallen steadily over the last decade while enrollment for Hispanic and Asian students has dramatically soared. In 2004, for example, African-American students represented about 7.4 percent of all of the students enrolled in medical schools, compared to just 7 percent in 2011.
