Other immediate thoughts (and I will add more this in another comment as I think of them:
1) How many of your students are continuing on directly from their undergraduate education and how many are returning students? This really affects level of understanding of life-school (+/- work) balance in the department, in my experience.
2) What percentage of the students are working 25 hours or more a week at a job outside of school?
This is the one I could not have known until I was already deep in the process and talking to grad students at other schools:
3) If the department is at a non-PhD granting institution, what is the level of effort that is expected of students to be granted a Masters? There is a real and known problem where schools that have no PhD program tend to expect a level of work out of their students that is closer to a PhD "lite" than a simple Masters. I'm not prepared to say if it's a good or bad thing in a vacuum, but it is something that department need to own up to and be more explicit about.
no subject
1) How many of your students are continuing on directly from their undergraduate education and how many are returning students? This really affects level of understanding of life-school (+/- work) balance in the department, in my experience.
2) What percentage of the students are working 25 hours or more a week at a job outside of school?
This is the one I could not have known until I was already deep in the process and talking to grad students at other schools:
3) If the department is at a non-PhD granting institution, what is the level of effort that is expected of students to be granted a Masters? There is a real and known problem where schools that have no PhD program tend to expect a level of work out of their students that is closer to a PhD "lite" than a simple Masters. I'm not prepared to say if it's a good or bad thing in a vacuum, but it is something that department need to own up to and be more explicit about.