12 UNITS
Pell Shield watches the countdown clocks already sitting in your SIS — SAP timeframes, remedial caps, unit thresholds, award gates — and texts the student while they can still do something about it.
/ semester · state completion grant
DRAG. THE MONEY IS A STAIRCASE, NOT A RAMP.
90 CREDITS
A student attempts their 90th credit and federal aid stops. Not because anything went wrong — a 60-credit associate degree runs out of Title IV runway at 90 attempted credits, and changing majors twice was enough to get there.
A student registers for 11.5 units and forfeits $1,298 a semester in state completion money, because the threshold is 12 and nobody mentioned it during add/drop.
A student switches from an applied science track to an academic transfer track, and their state technical scholarship silently voids.
Every one of these was knowable weeks in advance, from data you already have. The information existed. The message didn't.
THREE STEPS, ONE OF THEM AUTOMATED
DETECTS
Pell Shield evaluates every enrolled student against a versioned rule pack — federal Title IV constraints, your state's aid programs, your own institutional policies. It's arithmetic against your data, not a model improvising about policy.
REACHES
When a student is near a cliff and can still act, Pell Shield texts them — with the deadline and the one specific thing to do.
ROUTES
Loan counseling, SAP appeals, eligibility determinations — those become briefed tasks in your aid office's queue, with the student's situation already summarized.
THE RULES YOUR STUDENTS ARE SUBJECT TO
Federal aid ends at 90 attempted credits on a 60-credit degree. Pell Shield flags at 75, while course selection can still change the outcome.
Remedial coursework has a hard federal ceiling. Students hit it without ever being told there was one.
Loan eligibility is now tied to program length. A student taking 9 units a term stretches a two-year degree to four and runs out of borrowing halfway. Detectable at enrollment. Currently discovered at disbursement.
Drop below 6 units and federal loan access suspends entirely. The same drop event your registrar already sees, with a second consequence nobody connects.
WHAT IT WILL NOT SAY
Financial aid is not a domain where a confident wrong answer is a small error. So Pell Shield is designed around its own limits.
Every rule carries a citation, an effective date, a named human verifier, and a hard expiry. Past expiry, the rule goes silent. We'd rather send nothing than send last year's number.
A dollar amount that hasn't been checked against the issuing agency can generate a task for your staff. It cannot generate a text.
If a field isn't in your extract, the rule goes dormant and appears on your onboarding checklist. It never resolves to "probably fine."
Counseling, appeals, and determinations go to your counselors with a briefing — not to a student with an answer.
Each text stores the rule and pack version that produced it. If a rule is ever wrong, you can enumerate exactly who was told what, in seconds.
48 HOURS
Pell Shield runs on a CSV extract. No integration sprint, no vendor queue, no eighteen-month implementation. Send us what your SIS already exports and we'll show you your own cliffs — how many students are inside 15 credits of the SAP cap, how many are sitting at 11 units during add/drop, how many enrolled with no FAFSA on file.
Boom is a system of action. It sits on top of your system of record and doesn't ask to replace it.
14 YEARS
Boom was founded by a school psychologist who spent fourteen years in under-resourced Los Angeles campuses watching students disappear — and watching the systems around them notice weeks too late. The thesis came out of that: stop-out is a detection problem, not an advising problem. Financial aid loss is its most predictable form, because the rules are written down and the dates are known.
FEB 2026
Live across two LCTCS campuses
30,000
Students covered
~41%
Preliminary summer melt reduction vs. control at BRCC
Preliminary, in-progress, not peer-reviewed, and measured on summer melt rather than aid recovery. We'll show you the methodology.