Here are some of the best questions for a student survey about financial aid, plus tips on designing your own. You can instantly generate your survey with Specific, making the process fast and tailored.
Best open-ended questions for student surveys about financial aid
We’ve seen that open-ended questions really shine when you want to understand a student’s personal experiences, reasons for choices, or emotional reactions—basically, whenever you want depth instead of just data. These are perfect for surfacing barriers, knowledge gaps, and nuanced feedback that might remain hidden in more rigid formats.
Given that 64% of students who didn’t apply for aid cited lack of information or misconceptions about financial aid as key barriers, we should let students tell us, in their own words, what’s confusing or overwhelming them. [2]
What is your biggest challenge when it comes to understanding or applying for financial aid?
How did you first learn about financial aid opportunities, and what made you look deeper (or decide not to)?
Can you describe any misconceptions you or your friends had about who qualifies for financial aid?
What information do you wish you had before applying for financial aid?
If you didn’t apply for financial aid, what was your main reason?
How did your family or parents shape your view or decision around financial aid?
What improvements would you suggest for your school’s communication about financial aid?
Please share a story about a positive or negative experience with the financial aid process.
In what ways do you think financial aid impacts students’ choices about college?
What advice would you give to future students unsure about applying for financial aid?
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for student surveys about financial aid
Single-select multiple-choice questions let you quantify responses—or spark a conversation when students might hesitate or struggle to describe their viewpoint in detail. Sometimes, it’s much easier for students to select an option, especially when starting the conversation, and you can always follow up with open-ended questions to dig deeper.
Here are three examples for a student survey about financial aid:
Question: Have you ever applied for financial aid for your education?
Yes
No
I’m not sure
Question: What best describes your understanding of the financial aid process?
Very clear and confident
I have some knowledge but many questions
I feel confused or overwhelmed
Other
Question: Where did you get most of your information about financial aid?
School counselors
Parents or family
Friends or classmates
Online resources
When to follow up with “why?” Always add a follow-up “why?” when you want to understand the motivation behind a student’s answer. For example, if a student says they didn’t apply for financial aid, following up with “Can you share why you chose not to apply?” reveals key blockers you can address.
When and why to add the “Other” choice? Add “Other” when you suspect your list of choices isn’t exhaustive. This lets students bring up new channels or barriers you hadn’t considered. Coupling “Other” with a prompt—like “Please specify”—often leads to insights you might have missed with a limited list.
NPS question for student surveys about financial aid
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) asks how likely a student is to recommend a particular service or process—like the financial aid experience at your school. It’s brilliant for seeing the overall impact, identifying promoters, detractors, and passives, and figuring out which group needs more support. NPS is simple, yet powerful: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the financial aid process at our school to others?”
NPS works because it’s universally understood, quick to answer, and leads directly to actionable feedback—especially when combined with follow-up questions for low or high scores. You can generate an NPS survey for students about financial aid with Specific in seconds, including tailored follow-ups based on each score.
The power of follow-up questions
If you want better, richer survey data, make every survey conversational by using automatic follow-up questions. It’s genuinely a game-changer, and we cover exactly how this works in our guide to automated follow-up questions.
Specific’s AI takes each student’s answer and asks smart, contextual follow-ups—just like an experienced interviewer. This helps you clarify ambiguous answers and draw out deeper insight in real time. We’ve seen that surveys that feel conversational dramatically reduce data gaps and increase completion rates to as high as 70-90% compared to the sluggish 10-30% in traditional form-based surveys [5].
Student: “I didn’t apply because I thought I wouldn’t qualify.”
AI follow-up: “What made you think you wouldn’t qualify for financial aid?”
Student: “My parents helped with paperwork.”
AI follow-up: “What kind of support did your parents provide? Was anything challenging about it?”
How many followups to ask? 2–3 follow-ups per question is usually ideal. With Specific, you can always enable a setting to skip to the next question once you have what you need.
This makes it a conversational survey: Each student feels heard, and the survey feels like a natural back-and-forth—never an interrogation.
AI-assisted response analysis: Even if you collect tons of open-ended feedback, it’s now straightforward to analyze all responses with AI. You get summaries, themes, and actionable insight, all without drowning in unstructured text.
These smart, automated follow-ups are a newer concept—honestly, it’s worth trying to build your own survey and experience how much more natural and useful the feedback is as a result.
How to prompt ChatGPT to write great student survey questions about financial aid
You can absolutely use ChatGPT or similar AI to generate survey questions—especially if you give the AI enough context about your goals and your audience.
Start with a simple prompt like:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a student survey about financial aid.
If you give more context—like the age group, known challenges, or what you’re hoping to learn—the AI’s suggestions will be much sharper:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a survey of first-generation college students about financial aid. Focus on uncovering knowledge gaps, misconceptions, and how parents influence their decision to apply.
To organize your survey, try:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then, for any category you really want to explore deeply, ask:
Generate 10 questions for the categories “Application Barriers” and “Sources of Information about Financial Aid.”
What is a conversational survey and why use an AI survey builder?
A conversational survey transforms the typical “fill-out-this-form” experience into a dynamic, one-on-one conversation. Instead of dumping questions on students, you’re engaging them, asking just the right follow-ups, and making each response matter. The big difference is the human-like flow and context—something traditional surveys rarely achieve. And that makes your data better: more complete, honest, and actionable.
Here’s a quick comparison:
Manual Survey | AI-generated Conversational Survey |
Static, form-based questions | Dynamic conversation with AI-driven follow-ups |
Often low completion rates | Higher engagement and completion rates |
Lots of ambiguous or incomplete data | AI clarifies answers and gets full context in real time |
Manual analysis required | AI summarizes and maps out actionable patterns |
Why use AI for student surveys? The best AI survey generators (like Specific) don’t just save you time—they actually gather better feedback, thanks to smart follow-up questions and real-time context. With AI, your survey adapts naturally, helps clarify confusion, and empowers you to analyze hundreds of nuanced responses in minutes. The fact that survey fatigue leads 60% of respondents to abandon traditional forms for being too long or complex says it all [7].
If you want step-by-step guidance on launching your own survey, see our guide to easily creating a student financial aid survey.
Specific is recognized for its smooth, conversational survey experience, making it straightforward—and even enjoyable—for both survey creators and student respondents.
See this financial aid survey example now
Take the next step: turn your student financial aid insights into action. Create a custom, conversational survey that’s powerful, fast, and built to deliver results only modern AI can achieve.