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Hedge-fund magnate John Paulson is donating $400 million to Harvard University, the school said Wednesday, the largest gift in the school’s 379-year-old history and among the biggest ever to a U.S. university. The money will be used to endow the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will be renamed after Mr. Paulson. This “extraordinary gift will enable the growth and ensure the strength of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard for the benefit of generations to come,” said Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. Mr. Paulson graduated from Harvard’s Business School in 1980 and started an eponymous hedge fund in 1994. His firm made $15 billion in 2007 when it collected on bets that the housing market would collapse. Mr. Paulson personally pocketed $4 billion. The money will provide “a solid endowment for faculty development, research, scholarships and financial aid,” Mr. Paulson said in a statement. The gift comes on the heels of two other massive donations by alumni to Harvard, which has an endowment of $36 billion, one of the largest in the U.S. In 2014, hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin donated $150 million to the school, largely to be used for financial aid. At the time it was the largest gift in the school’s history. Less than a year later the family of Gerald Chan, a Harvard-educated investor, donated $350 million to the university’s school of public health. Other megagifts to top schools in recent years include $350 million to Cornell; $350 million to Johns Hopkins; $250 million to Yale and $225 million to the University of Pennsylvania. The gifts highlight the diverging fortunes of the nation’s colleges. The 10 richest institutions held nearly one-third of total cash and investments at four-year schools in fiscal 2014, while the top 40 accounted for two-thirds, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Wealth was concentrated among elite schools at similar rates before the financial crisis, but the gap shrunk as top schools lost big on more-volatile investments in 2008 and 2009. The rising fortunes of the wealthy universities are due to several factors, including the growing use of large-scale data analytics, which give college fundraisers a clearer picture of not only who has the capacity to give but who has the desire. That information makes large capital campaigns increasingly efficient and boosts the advantages of wealthier schools that produce wealthier alumni. Caroline Hoxby, a professor at Stanford who studies the economics of higher education, likens universities to venture-capital firms: They seek out the best students, invest heavily and frequently at a lossoften well beyond the cost of tuitionand hope to produce a handful of great successes who will give back enormous gifts or influence others to do so. Mr. Paulson’s gift will help transform a new campus Harvard is developing in the Boston neighborhood of Allston, across the Charles River from Cambridge. Allston has long been home to the business school and the football stadium, but Harvard is poised to begin construction on a 500,000-to-600,000- square-foot complex that will house part of the Engineering and Applied Sciences School, according to an article in Harvard Magazine. That complex is part of a much larger expansion.