Grad school survey, revisited

You may recall a while ago I ran a survey on where people applied to grad school. Obviously I've been sitting on these results for a while now, but I figured since it's that time of year when people are choosing grad schools, that I would say how things turned out.  Here's a summary of things that people thought were most important (deciding factor), and moderately important (contributing factor, in parens):

• Academic Program
• Specialty degree programs in my research area, 48%
• (Availability of interesting courses, 16%)
• (Time to completion, 4%)
• Application Process
• Nothing 
• Faculty Member(s)
• Read research papers by faculty member, 44%
• Geographic Area
• (Outside interests/personal preference, 15%)
• Recommendations from People 
• Professors in technical area, 45%
• (Teachers/academic advisors, 32%)
• (Technical colleagues, 20%)
• Reputation
• ... of research group, 61%
• ... of department/college, 50%
• (Ranking of university, 35%)
• (Reputation of university, 34%)
• Research Group
• Research group works on interesting problems, 55%
• Many faculty in a specialty area (eg., ML), 44%
• (Many faculty/students in general area (eg., AI), 33%)
• (Research group publishes a lot, 26%)
• Web Presence
• (Learned about group via web search, 37%)
• (Learned about dept/univ via web search, 24%)
• General
• Funding availability, 49%
• (High likelihood of being accepted, 12%)
• (Size of dept/university, 5%)

Overall these seem pretty reasonable.  And of course they all point to the fact that everyone should come to Maryland :P.  Except for the fact that we don't have specialty degree programs, but that's the one thing on the list that I actually think is a bit silly: it might make sense for MS, but I don't really think it should be an important consideration for Ph.D.s.  You can get the full results if you want to read them and the comments: they're pretty interesting, IMO.