No hold music. No email chains. No three-day wait. AggieAid gives every Aggie direct, intelligent access to their financial aid — powered by Claude AI.
Powered by Claude AI — trained on NCAT's actual financial aid policies. Toggle to Advisor View to see human oversight in action.
NCAT Office of Financial Aid
The average Aggie calls, emails, or visits the office and waits. AggieAid is available at 11pm on a Sunday — when the question actually hits.
Only AI can give every student a personalized, NCAT-specific answer at scale. A chatbot with scripts can't handle the nuance of financial aid. Claude can.
Right now advisors answer the same 10 questions all day. AggieAid handles those so advisors focus on students who actually need them.
ChatGPT doesn't know the difference between a SAP hold and a verification hold at THIS school. AggieAid does. Specificity wins.
First-gen students don't know the right questions to ask. AggieAid meets them where they are — plain language, no jargon, no assumptions. In any language Claude supports (50+).
"I didn't drop out. I just didn't understand what I owed."
— A real reason HBCU students don't return. AggieAid makes sure no Aggie ever says it.
Students log in via NCAT's existing SSO — same as Banner and Blackboard. Once verified, they ask any financial aid question in plain language.
Claude processes the question against NCAT's financial aid policy documents. Generates a personalized, accurate, plain-language response. Never guesses.
General questions answered in under 3 seconds. Complex cases — appeals, holds, account disputes — auto-create a ticket with full conversation context.
Advisors see the full AI conversation, add context, and respond. AI never makes final decisions on sensitive matters. Human always closes the loop.
Adjust the sliders to see the real return on investment for NCAT.
Security isn't a phase 2 feature. It's foundational.
Students authenticate via NCAT's existing SSO before accessing any account-specific information — the same system used for Banner and Blackboard. No new credentials, no new risk.
Students access their own records — the same way they do on Banner today. AggieAid doesn't store or transfer student data. It queries NCAT's systems in real time, answers, and closes the connection.
Claude AI has enterprise-grade safety by Anthropic. It won't hallucinate financial advice, won't make up policy, and flags uncertainty rather than guessing. When it doesn't know — it says so and escalates.
No AI decision is final on sensitive matters. Every appeal, every hold, every account dispute is reviewed by a real NCAT financial aid advisor before any action is taken.
Three phases. Clear milestones. Real path to scale.
One advisor. 50 students. One semester. Track tickets resolved by AI vs. escalated to humans. Measure student satisfaction and retention rate. Zero cost to NCAT — Claude free tier covers it.
Cost to NCAT: $0If 10 students are retained that semester, NCAT recovers $34,065 in tuition. We request $5,000/year operating budget to cover API costs and maintenance. That's a 680% return before scaling.
Projected ROI: 680%+Pitch the UNC System Office to license AggieAid across every campus. Howard, Spelman, Morehouse — every HBCU has this exact problem. We prove it at A&T first. Everything after that is growth.
Total addressable market: Every HBCU in America"UNCF invests in the education of students and the strengthening of HBCUs. But a student who loses aid access mid-semester can't be strengthened — they disappear."
The gap AggieAid closes
UNCF provides over $100 million in scholarships annually to HBCU students. But scholarship dollars alone don't retain students — information does.
A student can have a full UNCF scholarship and still stop out because they didn't understand a financial hold, missed a verification deadline, or couldn't get an answer in time.
AggieAid closes that last-mile gap. It ensures that every dollar UNCF invests in a student actually reaches them — by making sure no student loses their seat over a question that went unanswered.
UNCF scholarships require students to maintain enrollment and academic progress. AggieAid ensures students understand exactly what they need to do to keep their award — before they lose it.
AggieAid generates anonymized data on what financial questions HBCU students ask most. UNCF can use this to identify systemic gaps and design better support programs across all 37 member schools.
UNCF represents 37 private HBCUs. AggieAid pilots at NC A&T, proves retention impact, then UNCF becomes the distribution channel to deploy it across every member institution simultaneously.