Thank you all for the feedback. This was done with the intention of giving graduate students more information about the climate of graduate departments, but these concerns do seem to raise very serious worries about the methodology and the usefulness of any potential results. We tried to balance the concerns of retaliation from departments with the benefits of having an understanding for how graduate students feel about their departments, but many of the concerns raised here seem valid. For what it's worth, we were not intending to rank departments and not intending to compare them to each other. We weren't trying to villify certain departments, or anything of the sort. We've suspended the survey accepting results and will likely take it down.

I'm in my first year of an MA program at University of Missouri, St. Louis. I know that, for my own sake and many of the others in my cohort, the MA program serves as a way of helping those coming from smaller, lesser known programs in preparation for applying to PhD programs. Without going into specifics, the funding that I get is roughly equivalent to the figures mentioned by Anon1956. One other reason for the many MA students is that it serves as a "test-run" of life as a PhD student. A PhD takes considerably longer to complete than an MA, and for those who are unsure about whether or not they would like to do this for a living (not me, but explains some others in my cohort), an MA was a good way of gauging their level of interest in continuing on.