A $1.4 million, four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education should help Kansas University’s School of Business build a reputation as a leader in international business education, officials said Thursday.

KU officials received word earlier this week that it had been awarded $350,000 a year for four years to fund the school’s Center for International Business Education and Research.

Kansas University's School of Business has received a .4 million federal grant to fund the Center for International Business Education and Research, or CIBER. Business Dean William Fuerst, left, and CIBER Director Melissa Birch hope the grant will make the school a leader in international business education.

Melissa Birch, director of the CIBER program, said the grant would allow the business school to continue with its strategy of creating a strong focus on world issues.

“We want to build on our strengths, and the international arena is one of this university’s strengths,” Birch said. “It really started back in the 1950s when the university made a real effort to increase our international holdings in our library system and recruit a very international-type of faculty.”

Birch also said KU was one of the few universities in the country that had four federally-funded cultural study centers. Those centers focus largely on areas of the world that are ripe for international business, such as Latin America, East Asia, Russia and eastern Europe.

“We took a look at what the other schools on campus had to offer and realized we had the opportunity to link our business students up with some of the best language and cultural educators in the country,” Birch said.

KU received its first Department of Education Grant to fund the CIBER program in 1999, $740,000 spread over a three-year period. School officials believe the increase in this most recent grant is evidence that federal officials believe the program is on the right track.

William Fuerst, business dean, said the university had done research that showed about 25 percent of the university’s business students have had a “significant international academic experience,” such as study abroad or intensive studies about a particular region of the world.

National average for schools, Fuerst said, is about 5 percent.

“We’re well out in front there, and we want those numbers to grow through this grant,” Fuerst said.

With the grant money, the school will create a new study abroad program for its MBA students. The program will expand the stay of students in a foreign country from about a week to about two weeks and will add approximately six weeks of specialized classroom instruction to prepare the students for the trip.

Both Fuerst and Birch said KU’s focus on international business was appropriate because businesses of all sizes had opportunities to conduct international business.

“For someone wanting to get into business today to not have a significant understanding of the global economy really would be shortsighted,” Fuerst said.