Updated, 8:32 p.m. | When the billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin was a sophomore at Harvard, he was betting on convertible bonds in his dorm room — thanks to a satellite dish he had hooked up on the roof — while his fellow students were going to classes.
Twenty-eight years later, that formative experience will be paying dividends for his alma mater.
Mr. Griffin said on Wednesday that he was donating $150 million to Harvard College, the biggest single gift to the college ever. The money will largely go the college’s financial aid program as Harvard seeks to blunt criticism that higher education has become the province of the 1 percent. (The estimated annual cost of attending Harvard College is nearly $60,000, according to the College Board.)
“This was an opportunity to make a statement about Harvard as one of the most important higher education institutions in the world,” Mr. Griffin said in an interview.
Other universities have drawn bigger individual donations: Michael R. Bloomberg pledged $350 million to Johns Hopkins University last year, the latest in a one-man $1.1 billion capital campaign. John W. Kluge, a former television mogul, donated $400 million to Columbia University’s financial aid program seven years ago.
But Harvard has long been the powerhouse of the university fund-raising circuit, with its latest campaign aiming to collect a staggering $6.5 billion.
Thursday’s donation is part of that initiative, which kicked off with $2.8 billion already in the bank.
“I was absolutely thrilled,” Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, said in an interview. “Financial aid has been one of my highest priorities as president.”
The gift is also the largest by Mr. Griffin, the founder and chief executive of the investment giant Citadel, which is based in Chicago. With an estimated net worth of $4.4 billion, Mr. Griffin has been previously known more as a benefactor of the arts and a supporter of conservative politicians like Mitt Romney.
But his latest donation will support one of Harvard’s most ambitious initiatives. About $140 million of the donation will go toward creating 200 Griffin scholars and providing matching funds for a new program that is to create 600 scholarships. (The remaining $10 million will endow a new professorship at the Harvard Business School, where Mr. Griffin said he spent hundreds of hours poring over finance books in the pre-Internet era.)
In return, Harvard will rename its college’s financial aid office and its director’s title after Mr. Griffin.
Though Mr. Griffin did not receive financial aid when he attended Harvard, he did get assistance from a benefactor, his grandmother, who helped pay for his education. That experience, he said, instilled in him a recognition that others needed help to pay for a college degree.
“I was lucky to have a relative in a position to do that,” he said. “ A lot of kids don’t.”
Mr. Griffin went on to found Citadel in 1990, one year after graduating Harvard, setting him on a path that has made him a billionaire. He admitted that having a diploma from the college opened doors that would otherwise be closed for a 21-year-old college graduate.
Despite his not receiving financial aid, Mr. Griffin said that such assistance had long been a focus of his philanthropic efforts. For his 10-year class reunion, he established a scholarship named after his grandfather. He later joined the task force that helped give rise to the school’s first financial aid overhaul, what he described as “an incredibly bold and expensive undertaking.”
Still, as his 25-year class reunion approached several years ago, Mr. Griffin began considering what else he could give. Conversations with another Wall Street titan — Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs and a fellow alumnus — helped him focus on financial aid as an issue. (Though he lives in an aerie on the south edge of Central Park, Mr. Blankfein made his way through Harvard with a combination of scholarships and work.)
“I take my hat off to Lloyd for engaging with me and thinking about this gift,” Mr. Griffin said.
Ms. Faust of Harvard said that she considered the donation a model that should entice more contributions from alumni. The financial aid program has made significant strides since Harvard first announced its expansion a decade ago: 60 percent of undergraduates receive aid and pay an average of $12,000 in tuition and room and board, while 20 percent of their families pay nothing because they earn less than $65,000 a year.
“We’ve been able to send a message very clearly that we want these students and want them to consider Harvard,” she said.
Given Harvard’s existing enormous war chest, with nearly $31 billion in its endowment, did Mr. Griffin consider steering his money elsewhere? After all, he has already given $19 million to the Art Institute of Chicago and sponsors numerous education programs in that city.
He replied that he considered Harvard to be the natural recipient of his generosity, given how much its resources shaped his present. (Among them was a dorm superintendent who looked the other way when a 19-year-old Mr. Griffin climbed onto the roof to install the satellite dish.)
“I hope that this helps the next generation of Harvard have an experience that parallels mine,” he said.