Grant aids South L.A. medical students

When Jessica Bodden was accepted into medical school six years ago, she didn’t realize the extent of the loans she’d be taking on.

The South Los Angeles native completed her undergraduate degree in California with relatively low debt. But when it was time to pay first-year tuition at her dream medical school, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a private, nonprofit, historically Black institution in L.A.’s Willowbrook district, she began relying on needbased scholarships and loans to pay the bill.

Coming from a household that made less than $25,000 annually, and as the mother of a 2-year-old son, Bodden was forced to borrow heavily, sinking her into student debt of more than $200,000. Further, she took a two-year break from medical school to get a master’s in public health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

As her fourth-year anxieties were creeping up, Bodden’s medical school announced in September that it would deduct up to $100,000 from the debt of each Black and Latino student as part of a $7.7-million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The largest private gift the university has received in its 54-year history, the grant will benefit 82 currently enrolled medical students.

“I just remember feeling chills all over my body,” said Bodden, 29. “Because for a little girl like me, from South L.A., I didn’t go to medical school on scholarships. I had to fight for every single scholarship that I won after I was admitted. So it was just really nice just to have someone give.”

Charles R. Drew University is one of four historically Black medical colleges to be awarded funds as part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ $100-million commitment to help increase the number of Black doctors in the U.S. by reducing their debt burden. The others are Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The $100-million gift was split among the schools based on student population.

The grant is part of Michael R. Bloomberg’s Greenwood Initiative, created this year in response to the long-lasting effects of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The initiative strives to accelerate the pace of Black wealth accumulation and to address decades of systemic underinvestment in Black communities.

“COVID-19 has been especially devastating for the Black community, and the scarcity of Black doctors practicing in Black communities is one reason for it,” said Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and former mayor of New York City, in a statement. “More Black doctors will mean more Black lives saved and fewer health problems that limit economic opportunity. But right now, the burden of student debt and lack of financial aid means that the shortage of Black doctors could get even worse.”

Among students with education debt, the average amount is $200,000, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges.

Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Drew’s dean and a professor of medicine, who earned her degree at Harvard Medical School, understands firsthand the financial burden faced by many of her students. “It took me like 20 years to pay off my medical school debt. I wish somebody had taken half of it away,” she said.

“Medical school is expensive, and you don’t want students who come here because they want to serve their community to get so in debt that they then have to choose to do other things to make money,” she added. “So this is really a big gift for us.”

More than 85% of the school’s students report that they intend to practice in underserved communities after graduation.

Charles R. Drew University, named for a Black surgeon who produced seminal work on blood banking, was founded in 1966 in response to a lack of adequate medical facilities in the Watts area during the 1965 riots. With more than 80% of students and 71% of faculty from communities of color, the university has become a leader in research on health disparities, with a focus on the treatment and care of cancer, diabetes, cardiometabolic conditions and HIV/AIDS.

For Kalonji Cole, a fourth-year medical student, the Bloomberg grant was good news in an otherwise challenging year.

With “all of the craziness that 2020 has come with and all the kind of havoc COVID-19 has wreaked, I was pretty much in a state where I was just used to getting bad news, and then this came, and it was just amazing,” the 26-year-old said.

Much like Bodden, who is pursuing psychiatry after graduation, Cole has been paying for school mostly with loans. Now that nearly half his tuition will be covered by the Bloomberg grant, he can focus on applying for residency programs in internal medicine.

“Now, not having to be as stressed about our financial debt just really allows us to kind of breathe easy and to also even further sink our teeth into the mission of [Drew] and do right by our patients, and really do our part in helping to alleviate these healthcare disparities,” he said.

The school plans to erect a new medical school building and add a second medical degree that would be awarded solely by Drew. The current medicine degree is awarded jointly with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Dr. David M. Carlisle, Drew’s president and chief executive, said the new building will nearly triple the number of graduates, making “a significant impact on the physician workforce in the state of California.”