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.

Depending how you crunch the numbers, UNC Chapel HIll's Morehead-Cain Scholars Program is either in growth mode or has stumbled a bit in its ability to recruit.

With the significant help of a recent $100 million gift,
the scholarship foundation hopes to increase its annual pool to 75 students. The pool has risen steadily over the last several years, from 42 students in 2005 to 50 in 2006 to 58 in 2007 to 62 last year.

But if you look at the numbers in another way, you'll see that the program's yield - the percentage of students offered slots who accepted - dropped a bit this year, to 73 percent from 82 percent the prior year.