Columbia University announced Wednesday that it is getting a 400 million-dollar donation, the biggest gift in the school's history, from an alumnus who graduated from the school 70 years ago.

John Werner Kluge, 92, returned to his alma mater with the gift to be given to students as financial aid, one of the largest sums ever given to an American university solely for the purpose of financial aid.

The billionaire entrepreneur has said he would rather invest in people than buildings. The funds will be made from his estate when Kluge dies.

Last year, Forbes listed Kluge as the 25th richest man in America with a net fortune of 9.1 billion dollars. He has already given 100 million dollars to the school, which has supported more than 500 undergraduate students.

Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, said Tuesday night, "Obviously, this is an extraordinary gift by any standard. It's huge in its consequences and effects on the university."

Bollinger said half of the 400 million dollars would go to scholarships for undergraduates at Columbia College, and the other half to scholarships and fellowships in other parts of the university.

Columbia received an endowment of more than 5 billion dollars last year, one of the largest in the country but still behind other Ivy League universities.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the largest gift to a private university was a one-billion-dollar endowment last year from the Anil Agarwal Foundation to establish Vedanta University in India.

In the United States, the California Institute of Technology received 600 million dollars in 2001 from Gordon and Betty Moore and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The same year, Stanford University received 400 million dollars from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.