Honolulu businessman Jay Shidler is adding to his gifts to the University of Hawai'i's business school with a $3 million donation that will bring his total contributions to the school to $30 million.

Shidler has agreed to underwrite the business school's new master's degree in financial engineering, including the offering of $750,000 in scholarships during the program's first three years.

"This is particularly important now because we're facing budget cuts," said V. Vance Roley, dean of the business school. "We would not have been able to launch this program without Jay's gift."

Shidler has proven to be one of the university's biggest benefactors in the past several years, donating $25 million in 2006 with the idea of helping transform the business school on the Manoa campus into a top public university program. The school was renamed the Shidler College of Business in honor of the successful real estate investor.

Since that time Shidler has donated another $2 million to the school in the form of in-kind gifts.

His latest gift, $3 million to help support the new program during its first several years, came after Shidler played a role in identifying the need for such a degree and helping conceive the program's framework.

Shidler said the new program could be a great addition for the university and is a degree that is increasingly sought by employers. In recent years universities such as Stanford, the University of California Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon have added such programs.

"This is a way for us to attract some of the brightest people coming out of undergraduate school," Shidler said.

He downplayed the magnitude of his newest gift, saying the school needed the help in underwriting the program. The money will go to help renovate a classroom, obtain specialized software, get a Bloomberg data terminal and provide $250,000 of scholarships annually for the first three years of the program.

Tuition to the program is $19,000 with class sizes limited to 35.

Gunter Meissner, program director, said he had already received inquiries from more than 60 prospective students.

"We have good interest already," Meissner said. "We haven't even started advertising."

BEYOND A 'COOL DEGREE'

It is thought the offering of the degree is especially timely given Wall Street's recent financial crisis and questions over whether investors adequately gauged the risks of investments they were buying. It's expected that graduates with the degree will command higher salaries than those who graduate with master's of business administration degrees, which is a two-year program.

The master's of financial engineering curriculum melds quantitative finance, mathematics and computer science. The program will also draw upon faculty from UH's School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology to help with risk assessment with weather and climate change.

"It's really a cool degree," Shidler said. But "we didn't want to do something that's just in fashion. We wanted to do something that structurally had legs.

"We need to understand what we're buying and understand how the world is working in a much more complex manner."

Shidler has been a little uncomfortable with the notoriety his gifts have brought him after mostly shunning high-profile publicity during his successful business career.

Shidler got his start in real estate while attending UH, graduating in 1968 and going on to start more than 30 companies.

His current businesses include a real estate investment trust that owns The Davies Pacific Center, the Waterfront Plaza office complex and the Pan Am Building on Kapi'olani Boulevard.

Part of his success has come from assessing risk, which has become something of an interest to Shidler, who earlier this year was awarded a U.S. patent for developing a system for creating, pricing and trading of sophisticated financial instruments such as credit-default swaps.

Roley said the new program should enhance the business school's reputation because it expects to attract top-tier students.

"If you have one outstanding program you hope that it adds to the reputation of the others," he said.