Sierra Nevada College has announced that it will get a cash infusion of up to $15-million over the next five to seven years from two for-profit education companies that are its new partners, Knowledge Universe Learning Group LLC and Cardean Learning Group LLC. The college, in Incline Village, Nev., was on the verge of closing before entering the partnership last fall.

Knowledge Universe, which owns Cardean University, also plans to share software and technological support to allow Sierra Nevada to start offering classes online. The college hopes to increase its enrollment from the current 300 students to 1,000. Sierra Nevada intends to remain a free-standing liberal-arts college. The current 22-member Board of Trustees will be dissolved when the deal closes, on April 18. It will be replaced by a nine-member board to be made up of three current members, three newly elected independent members, and three members affiliated with Knowledge Universe.

This will be the second partnership between Cardean and a nonprofit institution. Cardean runs Ellis College, which offers online undergraduate and graduate business degrees from the New York Institute of Technology. —Martin Van Der Werf