California State University, Northridge has received $7.3 million from the estate of a former San Fernando High School art teacher and her husband, the Los Angeles Daily News reports.

The bequest from the late Mary and Jack Bayramian — the largest in the university's forty-eight-year history, topping Disney CEO Michael Eisner's $7 million gift in 2002 — will create the Bayramian Family Scholarship Fund. Income from the bulk of the gift will support the Mary and Jack Bayramian Presidential Scholars program, which will provide scholarships of $5,000 to at least two dozen high-achieving upper-division students annually. The remaining $2.3 million will fund the Mary Bayramian Arts Scholars program, the largest gift to date to Imagine the Arts, the capital campaign for CSUN's planned $100 million, 1,600-seat performing arts center.

"This remarkable gift from Mary and Jack Bayramian will empower the university to support outstanding students," said CSUN president Jolene Koester. "The Bayramians...now have extended that caring to improve the lives of hundreds of students."

The children of Armenian immigrants, Mary and Jack Bayramian graduated from the same high school and were married for sixty years. Following World War II, Jack sold vacuum cleaners, owned a Van Nuys electrical shop, and later worked for twenty years as a switchboard installer, technician, and system troubleshooter for a utilities company. Mary was a homemaker who enrolled in college in her thirties, earning an associate's degree from Pierce College, then a bachelor's degree in art and a teaching credential from San Fernando Valley State College, which became CSUN in the early 1960s. The couple invested in real estate in San Fernando Valley and Laguna Beach, where they bought fixer-upper homes, renovated them, and resold them.