Taking on the Morehead

Don Taylor has a mild case of Morehead envy.

Taylor, 41, is the director of the Benjamin N. Duke Scholarship program at Duke University, which targets students from the Carolinas. As such, he quite often finds his program competing with UNC Chapel Hill and its Morehead-Cain scholarship program, this state's entrenched, gold standard for merit scholarships.

Of the students offered B.N. Duke Scholarships who decline to go to another university, half on average accept a Morehead-Cain scholarship and attend UNC-CH; the other half go to some other university - often in the Ivy League.

It is surely acceptable that Taylor, a Duke public policy professor, can speak kindly of UNC-CH and its top scholarship program. He is a Carolina alum with three degrees from the state's flagship university, making him, as he puts it, "the most unlikely Duke professor ever."

The B.N. Duke program started in 1985 and offers 12 to 15 scholarships a year. Generally, two-thirds hail from North Carolina, the rest from South Carolina. In this year's class, 12 of 15 scholars are North Carolinians.

Taylor has led the B.N. Duke Scholars program for 18 months now and got a boost recently when Duke made additional investment in its scholarships. He spoke to the News & Observer this week about that change and the challenge of convincing North Carolinians that Duke is the place for them.

News & Observer: The scholarship just became fully funded for the first time. How big a change is that?

Don Taylor: The short version is: Starting with freshmen now, the Duke scholarships, meaning the B.N. Duke, the A.B. Duke, the Reginaldo Howard scholarship, they all became full tuition, room, board and mandatory fees. Duke just did it. Before that, none of the scholarships covered everything. You're talking about $15,000 a year in increase. The Benjamin Duke Scholarship, the value of it over four years is over $200,000 now. Before, students would have had to pay room and board. It basically meant you could get a scholarship from Duke and still have to pay something.

N&O: You run the B.N. Duke program, which is for students from the Carolinas. How does this new money change how you find students? Are more kids in play now?

DT: We've tried to be pretty aggressive in North Carolina to let students know the scholarship exists and use it to increase the number of students who apply to Duke. I go around to high schools and a lot of times students' first reaction is "I can't afford Duke." So I say "You can if you get the scholarship."

The Morehead [at UNC Chapel Hill] is one of the most powerful brands in North Carolina. Everyone knows about it. The brilliance of the Morehead is that it gets high schools to recruit for them. The B.N. Duke is somewhat unknown, so one of my goals is to increase the number of people who know it exists. I want to leverage this scholarship as a recruitment tool.

N&O: So you actually compete with other scholarship programs? And the Morehead-Cain is your chief rival?

DT: Absolutely. I know for a fact we compete with [the morehead]. This past year, I think there were 6 kids offered the B.N. Duke and the Morehead, and we got 4 and they got 2. There were two kids, I think, who declined to even interview fro the B.N. Duke and took the Morehead. The Morehead, for the last half century, has been taking the best kids from the state and making them better. I have great admiration for it.

N&O: What about the Robertson Scholars program, which allows students to attend both Duke and UNC? Is that a competitor as well?

DT: We understand ourselves to be collaborators. At Duke you can't be a finalist for the B.N. Duke and for the Duke Robertson. We deal with that informally ahead of time. Only one of us can invite a kid to be a finalist.

The Morehead is the bigger competitor for us, in part because they offer so many more scholarships to kids from North Carolina. Thirteen percent of Duke's student body is from North Carolina, our most common state. Second is California in this class. I think Duke as a whole doesn't understand itself to be in lots of competition, but I understand us [with the B.N. Duke program] to be in desperate competition for kids from North Carolina.

N&O: But even though a good deal of Duke students are North Carolinians, there's still some sort of stigma in the minds of many of the state's high school students about Duke? It still seems unattainable?

DT: I went to Goldsboro high. I applied only to Carolina. Carolina was a great place that changed my life. I was as likely to apply to Duke to go to college as I was to go to Mars to go to College. That's a problem that there's good students in this state who don't even apply to Duke. That's driven in part by perceived or real arrogance on Duke's part that turns people off.

What I'm saying is that the best students from North Carolina have something to offer Duke as well. I'm not willing to sit back and just accept that whoever applies, we pick from. We should go and recruit. The people of our state deserve to have their kids fought over. Duke does more in North Carolina than in any other state. We go to more college fairs and more high schools than any other state. But we need to do more. For these best students, we need to make sure we do everything we can do.

N&O: Your program brings in about 15 students a year. Do you think it should be a larger program?

DT: I actually don't. I think one of our niches is that we think of the B.N. Duke as a family. I think it's as big as it needs to be in order to allow us to run it the way we want it to be. We have two full-time employees and a director — me. I think the number of students is about right. We're a fairly lean operation, I guess you could say. And I think it works for us. We couldn't double the scholarship numbers.