Growing up in Hoover, Ala., Rotimi Kukoyi dreamed of becoming a physician, but he knew he would need a scholarship to achieve that goal. As a top student at Hoover High School, that wasn’t a problem. Scholarship offers came flooding in, some of them offering full tuition. But one of them stood out – Morehead-Cain.
“I went to the Morehead-Cain discovery weekend, it was like being handed the keys to a BMW or something,” Kukoyi says. “It was just such a cool experience, meeting alumni, hearing about the personalized summers, and meeting the other scholars.”
The Morehead-Cain Foundation, founded in 1945 as the first merit scholarship program, supports students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to tuition, the foundation offers its scholars ongoing mentoring, networking with alumni and financial support for summer experiences.
Foundation President Chris Bradford calls it “an innovation engine for the student experience.”
Kukoyi said Morehead-Cain had a different vibe than other scholarship programs that provided financial support but little else.
“For Morehead-Cain, it’s more of an investment, an investment in a student’s acceleration that really lets you figure out what your place in the world is and how you want to make your impact by the end of your four years or five years or six years,” Kukoyi said.
At UNC, he is majoring in health policy and management at the Gillings School of Global Public Health with minors in chemistry and biology. This fall, he goes to graduate school at the University of Oxford in England as a Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar.
Leadership as a first principle
Unlike many programs, Morehead-Cain is not oriented toward a single career pipeline. Its scholars pursue paths ranging from medicine and government to education, business, and the clergy. Bradford says they are united in their intent to leave their communities “more flourishing than they found them.”
Bradford says colleges often proclaim leadership as part of their mission, but leave its development to chance — assuming it will emerge organically through clubs, classes or ambition. Morehead-Cain takes a different approach: leadership is engineered into the student experience through “sustained and escalating challenges.”
“It is through discomfort that we all learn and grow,” Bradford says.
For Morehead-Cain scholars, that begins before they ever set foot on campus.
Designing discomfort
The summer before freshman year, students are sent on a three-week wilderness expedition without their phones. The goal is not outdoor recreation, but forced independence: learning to make decisions, rely on peers, and function without constant connection to parents or digital validation. For many students, Bradford notes, it is the first time they have gone even a day without direct contact with home.
Kukoyi remembers the experience as challenging, especially the first day. He had never camped or hiked before. And then there were the 12 days of kayaking.
“I think the takeaway from that experience is that leadership really shines in the challenging moments, not the easy ones. Sometimes things are going to be hard, and you don’t really have the choice to give up, but leadership can help motivate you and also inspire others around you.”
And there was another benefit. Unlike many out-of-state students, Kukoyi started UNC with a group of friends.
From there, the challenges continue. During the first year, scholars receive coaching to help them stretch academically and personally. The following summer, they participate in a program called Civic Collaboration, traveling in small teams to medium-sized American cities to work with local organizations on real civic problems.
“The Civic Collaboration experience is moving from answering questions to recognizing that most challenges are nebulous in the real world and require you to become a master of asking good questions, not just answering them,” Bradford says.
Kukoyi was part of a group that worked with Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, Mich., meeting with a variety of community and health care leaders, identifying problems and developing potential solutions.
“It made things very tangible for me. Coming in as a freshman, I knew I was interested in health equity and making people healthier, but I didn’t know what that meant in practice. So in the Civic Collaboration, I actually had to work on a problem at the ground level. And I realized these are the real barriers to health equity. This is what it looks like in practice. And that set me up for the rest of my undergrad years.”
Leadership lived, not studied
In their final years, scholars design their own summer experiences, including one spent outside the US and another focused on professional development. By graduation, leadership is no longer theoretical. It is something they have practiced — in unfamiliar settings, under real constraints, with real consequences.
When planning his summer overseas, Kukoyi consulted with a Morehead-Cain alumnus who was the chief of staff of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Kukoyi wanted to go to Nigeria, which faces some of the world’s biggest health care challenges. It’s also his parents’ native country. The alum opened the door.
Kukoyi spent his time working – sometimes 50 hours a week – on hospital quality improvement, while getting a taste of his parents’ country. He also met his aunt.
After his junior year, he stayed in the US, working with Well in Boston, a digital wellness company started by Dave Werry, another Morehead-Cain alumnus.
Now a senior, Kukoyi is visiting Japan to study traditional medicine with a grant from the Lovelace Fund.
He also works with the UNC Student Health Action Coalition to help uninsured residents enroll in coverage and develops health policy at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. And, he is the president of the senior class.
The stakes in an age of disruption
Bradford says that developing leadership skills is even more important amid the broader anxiety facing higher education. As AI and automation reshape knowledge work, the traditional markers of academic success — credit hours, grades, even certain technical skills — feel increasingly insufficient.
Universities need to find ways to develop character, adaptability, and what he calls “creative confidence”: the ability to navigate uncertainty, ask meaningful questions, and lead amid disruption. In this view, leadership development is not extracurricular. It is foundational to thriving in an unpredictable world.
Today, the foundation supports roughly 360 scholars, enrolling about 75 to 80 new freshmen each year, along with sophomores and global fellows. Bradford expects those numbers to grow and hopes the ideas behind the program will spread even faster — through partnerships with honors programs, student affairs offices, and other universities looking to rethink the student experience.
“We are worried about a generation that’s going to have to navigate lots of disruption, lots of uncertainty,” Bradford says. “I think the best way to prepare them for that disruption is to structure their experience in a way that expects them to always be uncomfortable. It gives them the confidence to manage it and not feel threatened by it.”