Sitting around an outdoor table at the Red Crab, a restaurant on the tropical island of Grenada festooned with palm trees and fiery bougainvillea, a dozen aspiring doctors bashfully conceded that they had been, at best, near misses when it came to getting into medical school in the United States.

Many of them had not earned A’s in college physics and organic chemistry. Many had tried other careers first — among them were a talent scout, a ballerina, a pianist and an engineer. And some had come tantalizingly close to the prize. The dancer, Corinne Vidulich, described the agony of being on the waiting list at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for nine months. “They let me know the week before the term started that I didn’t get in,” said Ms. Vidulich, wearing the telltale all-black of a New Yorker. “It was crushing.”

Now they were all students at St. George’s University School of Medicine, one of dozens of medical schools that have sprung up in the Caribbean over the last four decades to catch the overflow of Americans who cannot find a medical school in their home country willing to take them, who for years have contended with the stigma of not being good enough.

St. George’s is their second chance.

Stephen Franco’s lax study habits had earned him C’s in freshman biology and chemistry at Binghamton University, not good enough for the medical schools he applied to in the United States. St. George’s offered him conditional admission, a four-month preview of courses, money back guaranteed if he didn’t pass. He passed. But in his first semester, he regularly woke his mother late at night to tell her he was terrified and might have to drop out. “If you want to be a science teacher, that’s O.K., too,” she would say to console him. Now 24 and entering his third year as an honors student, he is hoping to take over his father’s internal medicine practice in Brooklyn.