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 of that group 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.

Read on for Taylor's take on the competition with UNC's top scholarship program.