The price of perpetuity can vary widely.
Fund-raising consultant Charles Gobel said donors can expect to have to pay anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent of a building’s cost to have their name carved into it.
Large, prestigious hospitals will only offer to sell the name for an entire building, while smaller, hungrier institutions will consider naming hallways and rooms for a contribution, he said.
A strange exception to this rule was when Harvard’s law school accepted $100,000 from a 1971 graduate in exchange for naming a bathroom after him.