Rich graduates from the University of Warwick are being offered the chance to have professorial chairs or buildings named after them if they support poor students.

A plea has gone out to people who studied at the university to back a hardship fund for students who would not otherwise be able to afford to go into higher education.

Twenty-five scholarships were created last year for students who would have qualified for a full maintenance grant before they were scrapped by the government.

And extra efforts are being made to support the students, who come from households with a residual income of less than £10,000 a year.

People who have been successful in their careers are being asked to consider making a larger donation and fund new research or support the building programme on campus.

University spokesman Peter Dunn said the request followed a successful telephone campaign where former graduates were contacted and asked for donations.

Since 1997 the appeal has raised more than £440,000.

Mr Dunn said Warwick was at a disadvantage compared to older universities, which had a number of lucrative legacies.

He said:

"If you are Oxford or Cambridge and you’ve been around since 1300 or so you get a lot of compound interest on donations from medieval barons.

"Warwick doesn’t have that sort of thing and it is only now that there are people who are getting to the top of their industry."

He said people like BBC 1 Controller Peter Salmon, who studied at Warwick, were the sort of the people now being appointed to key positions in the country.