A $30 million gift to the City University of New York is a signal of support for the school’s effort to bolster its academic reputation.

The gift, the largest ever given to the university, will enable it to purchase a permanent home for the elite Honors College. A portion of the gift, from businessman William Macaulay, will also contribute to the program’s endowment.

CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, said yesterday that the gift affirms the school’s move toward higher scholastic standards over the past few years. “It’s a symbolically powerful message that the university is attracting good investors, saying this is a place that deserves their support,” he said.

The gift comes nearly simultaneously as another record-breaking donation, a $100 million gift to Yeshiva University yesterday from oil executive Ronald Stanton. “It breaks the glass ceiling,” Yeshiva’s president, Richard Joel, said of a “revolving” discretionary fund to be used as he chooses.

Prior to yesterday’s gift, the largest donation to CUNY was a $26 million endowment in October 2005, officials said. That gift and yesterday’s donation are steps toward a $1.2 billion funding target announced more than three years ago, Mr. Goldstein said. So far, the school has accrued some $800 million toward that goal, he said.

Mr. Macaulay, a 1966 CUNY graduate who is chairman and CEO of First Reserve Corp., attributed his gift in part to his experience at CUNY. “A lot of what I use today in my business are things I learned getting an economics degree at City,” he said. “I am very thankful for the fundamentals and the education that I got.”

The gifts at CUNY and Yeshiva come at a time of major philanthropic activity for colleges and universities.

“Mega-gifts have now become almost a daily ritual,” the chairman and executive director of New York University’s George Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising, Naomi Levine, said. Gifts to education are the second-largest area of philanthropy in the country, behind donations to religious institutions, she said. “It is more usual for the privates to get the big gifts, but for the publics to get the big gifts is a wonderful development.”

Indeed, the $30 million donation is dwarfed by gifts made to CUNY’s private counterparts in New York City. In March, Columbia University received its largest gift, $200 million, from the Dawn M. Greene and Jerome L. Greene Foundation to establish a neuroscience center.

Almost simultaneously, New York University accepted a cash donation of up to $200 million from the Leon Levy Foundation to create an institute on the ancient world. NYU’s largest gift came in 1994, from Sir Harold Acton, who donated a 57-acre Italian estate, an art collection, and at least $25 million in cash to the school. The total value of the gift was estimated at between $250 million and $500 million, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of major private gifts to higher education since 1967.

Mr. Macaulay, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School but does not consider himself a major donor there, said, “Thirty million means a lot more to the City University than it does to the Ivy League colleges that are very well endowed.

“The combination of what they’re trying to do and the fact that a gift of this type, frankly, goes a long way is the combination that caused me to make the donation to CUNY,” he said.

Launched in 2001, the school’s Honors College represents CUNY’s reaction to criticism of its open enrollment policy and the perceived slip in academic standards during the late 1990s. Today, 1,266 students attend the invitation-only program, where the average SAT score is 1,380 and the average high school GPA is about 92, school officials said.

The payoff, administrators said, can be seen in graduates’ accomplishments: In the first graduating class, in 2005, 25% of students graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Some 85% of students do post-graduate work at top universities, Mr. Goldstein said.

“We really have reshaped many of our academic programs,” Mr. Goldstein said, adding that the Honors College has been “the most symbolic effort we’ve made pointing to a rebirth here at the university.”

School officials said the donation would centralize the Honors College students, who will still attend classes on CUNY’s multiple campuses but have a base on the Upper West Side for lectures, speakers, and other programs.

Located on a tree-lined street blocks away from Lincoln Center, the building CUNY will inhabit underwent extensive renovations in the late 1990s to accommodate Makor/Steinhardt, a center for Jewish life. Originally constructed by the Swiss Benevolent Society of New York in 1904 and 1905, it was a group home for young women for many years.

After being put on the market this spring, CUNY won it in a multiple-bid auction process facilitated by CB Richard Ellis, the real estate company handling the sale, employees at the company said. The closing is scheduled for some time in the next few weeks, a broker who helped handle the sale, Ned Midgley, said.

School administrators said a team of architects would conform the building to CUNY’s needs before the Honors College moves in, perhaps sometime next year.