By Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News

American University of the Caribbean's main building on St. Maarten, as seen from the site of a new $30 million building. (Nicholas Calcott/Bloomberg News)

When he was a child, David Adams pretended to operate on his stuffed animals.

As a teen, the Salt Lake City native became a paramedic. He wanted to train to become a physician after graduating from the University of Utah with a bachelor's degree in health promotion and education in 2009 but was rejected by two dozen U.S. medical schools.

Three years later, he earned a Master of Science in medical health sciences from Touro University Nevada and applied again. Adams was accepted to American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, which is owned by Downers Grove, Ill.-based DeVry Inc.

Adams, now 31, moved with his wife, Jessica, and their two young children to a two-bedroom apartment that smelled of dog urine and had a broken stove on the Dutch part of St. Maarten on Jan. 1. After financing his first two semesters with $67,000 in U.S. government-backed loans, Adams expects to leave medical school with as much as $400,000 in debt and about a 20 percent chance of never practicing as a physician in the U.S.

"I understand that I am coming from behind a little bit, attending a Caribbean medical school," Adams says, standing on his apartment's terrace, watching sailboats glide by on the deep-blue waters of Simpson Bay Lagoon.

DeVry, which has two for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean, is accepting hundreds of students who were rejected by U.S. medical colleges. These students amass more debt than their U.S. counterparts a median of $253,072 in June 2012 at AUC versus $170,000 for 2012 graduates of U.S. medical schools.

And that gap is even greater because the U.S. figure, compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges, includes student debt incurred for undergraduate or other degrees, while the DeVry number is only federal medical school loans.

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DeVry lures medical school rejects as taxpayers fund failed debt