Price climbs for b-school naming.

Big-time wealth offers the chance to buy a Learjet, an island, an NBA basketball franchise or, these days, a more enduring and worthy bauble: a big-time business school with your name inscribed on the gates.

In the case of the most prestigious U.S. business schools, the price of immortality has been going up.

Late last year, the University of Michigan announced that Stephen M. Ross, developer of the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center at Manhattan's Columbus Circle, had donated $100 million to the University of Michigan business school--the biggest gift ever to a U.S. business school.

The Michigan announcement followed by only a few months a $55 million gift from David Tepper, founder of the New Jersey-based Appaloosa Management LP hedge fund, to Carnegie Mellon University's business school, now known as the David A. Tepper School of Business.

On the heels of the 1980s boom in undergraduate and graduate applications to U.S. business schools, deans began to step up solicitations for graduate donations. The wealthiest and most willing donors turned out to be mostly male entrepreneurs, men who had built vast fortunes and whose money could be used to bid for the best professors, to subsidize the best students and to erect the most fabulous buildings.

Robert Dolan, dean of Michigan's business school since 2001, had taught at Harvard University's business school and was an authority in pricing theory; he also had watched the size of donations climb and believed he knew how much naming rights ought to be worth.

Ross was raised in Detroit and graduated from Michigan in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in business administration. Having already contributed millions to the university, he thought $50 million might be sufficient to see his name chiseled in granite. "Sorry, that won't be enough," Dolan said he told Ross at one decisive meeting. "Actually, I had been thinking that $100 million was the right number--that would be an amount that would serve notice on Harvard, Wharton and the rest of them that we are world class and intend to stay that way."

Dolan knew that Ross had a special reason for wanting to put his name on the school. Ross's uncle, Max Fisher, the 96-year-old Detroit financier, in 1993 had donated $20 million to name Ohio State University's business school. Fisher entered Ohio State--Michigan's gridiron rival--on a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1930.

Dolan--very politely--dug in his heels. He explained his vision of new campus buildings and professors and programs and why he needed twice as much as Ross's offer.

And so Dolan's most promising prospect agreed to the $100 million--$75 million in cash, $25 million as a bequest.

One day very soon it may be said, "I graduated from Ross," and people outside Ann Arbor, Mich. will know what that means.