With regards to program strength, I was given an interesting piece of advice when I applied to graduate school. It is this: look at/ ask about what types of dissertation research and dissertation writing fellowships and grants graduate students are receiving. Most top programs only guarantee 5 years of funding (although many have possibilities of additional year(s) from internal fellowships), but obviously many people in our field take more than 5 years to finish a PhD. So, strong programs have ABD grad students receiving competitive external fellowships with some regularity. This is particularly relevant for archaeologists and some types of ancient historians, who tend to apply to external fellowships and grants to fund fieldwork more than philologists, I think.
Finding out about at dissertation fellowship recipients is not an easy thing to do. For one thing, isn't a compilation of such fellowships-- and there are a lot of them, depending on geographic research area or topic or temporal frame. Furthermore, not every department provides up-to-date grad student bios, and not every fellowship makes public the list of recipients. But, nevertheless, it's worth at least noting what fellowships the dissertation-phase students are receiving, when that information is available. External fellowships, particularly the more competitive ones, can be one telling indicator of how well a department is preparing its students for the wider world in their final years of grad school.