Warelin

If you took the test in after July 1, 2016, your scores would be valid until 5 years after your test date. If it was prior to this date in this year, scores expire on June 30, 2021.
If you're satisfied with your scores, there would be no reason to retake the exam.

I think your post means well but I'm not sure how useful it is when applying to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. 

Humanities tend to rely significantly less on stats than than Math does and relies more on "fit". The same applicant could submit the same application to 12 programs one year and get rejected from all 12. They could reapply next year and get into a number of schools that previously rejected them. Departments change. And the applicants they're looking for also change from year to year. You might get rejected from a school ranked T150, T100, T80, T60 but get accepted into a T40 , T20, and T30 school. You might also end up rejecting the T20 and T30 school for the T40 simply because it's a better fit. 

We've also seen people with perfect GRE scores and GPAs from ivy league institutions get rejected from every single school they've applied to. Writing matters. Interests matter.

What topics in English currently interest you? 
 
Some websites do a great job of listing out requirements. Others leave some things to be fairly opaque. I think it's important to remember that these colleges are making a very heavy investment in you. Some colleges are making hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment of you over 5-6 years. As such, they want to ensure that that person has the potential to succeed and fit in well in their program. One of the easiest ways to do this is to see their commitment to the field if they've earned a Master's degree. Are they aware of current research in the field? Are they aware of what makes their project important and why is it deserving of funding? Have they engaged with others via conferences? Are they a student that we would enjoy spending time with within the field? How close are they to the writing we'd like to see more of? As a result, colleges prefer to make fairly safe bets on who they accept and some colleges will also reject students that they believe would reject them. Safeties are non-existent within the humanities.
 
I think this is largely school-dependent. According to this article, more people at Harvard and Johns Hopkins graduated with honors than graduated without honors. While there are schools known for grade inflation, there are some schools that are widely known for grade deflation. I imagine that those on the admissions committee would be familiar if schools fall on either of those two lists. I also think that the English community's smaller size allows committee members to be more acquainted with how certain professors write their endorsements for potential candidates. Endorsements go beyond grades earned in class and may very well include personal growth, research, and office hour discussions/visits.
 
I think most schools welcome candidates with a variety of interests. Schools with more resources are able to have more professors in different areas but it doesn't mean that they're actively looking to expand each area. Very few schools are really well known for just one field. Notre Dame sticks out for Medieval/Early Modern. I think that about 75-80 percent of their cohort has a specific interest within those time periods. It's not a surprise though considering Notre Dame has put a lot of resources within that concentration. I think your challenge here is that you'll need to convince a panel of professors on why they should admit you over someone who may have more experience within the subject. They need to feel assured that you're devoted to English and that your potential to complete the "marathon" is there. (Besides the dissertation and teaching, you'll also be required to complete comprehensive exams which would test your knowledge on a wide variety of books._

You won't get in.
Everyone else has already hit on the substantive points why, but I'll put it in more direct language. You don't need 18 credits in English necessarily, but you need substantial upper-level humanities coursework to be considered and to write a decent SOP and WS. 3 gen eds is not enough. You also need specific research interests (specific: Turkish women's poetry in the 20th century) as well as apparent understanding of how they fit into the context of the relevant subfield and why anyone should care about them, which requires knowledge of the field (what was written about Turkish women's poetry in the past? What is being written now? Who are main scholars working on this thematic? What are the theoretical lenses used? What are the questions people are interested in?) as well as of the content. You need to be fluent in the language(s) of your primary sources and proficient or close to proficient in other relevant languages. You need to have grounding in critical theory, ideally demonstrated through advanced theory classes and in your writing sample. Finally, you need a 15-20 pp writing sample on your topic of interest that demonstrates extensive use of primary and secondary sources, and 3 letters from professors who can speak to your potential as a literature scholar (they don't have to be comparative literature professors, but they can't be engineering professors).
All of the above is what you need just to be a viable candidate for admission at any PhD program. Getting admitted to a top program like Yale is another story.


Would it make sense for the admissions team to factor in a metric which has no impact on your likelihood of excelling in their program? Because, irrespectively of any grade inflation, your ability to, say, integrate a function over a 3D plane has no application in humanities scholarship, and contrary to what you are implying, your ability in the former may have little or no relationship to your ability in the latter. So really your irrelevant GPA would tell the admissions committee almost nothing. GPA and GRE also aren't very important.
I think you are misunderstanding what a PhD is: it is helpful to think of it as a job rather than as school. The reason you are funded in a PhD program is because the department expects you to be a professional who is doing a job. And whereas good departments won't saddle you with teaching duties in your first semester, they very much will expect you to hit the ground running: to be able to participate in graduate theory seminars, to immediately start working with primary sources without needing 2 years of language classes, to start producing publishable work soon after comps. Just as an engineering firm wouldn't hire you for an engineering position without an engineering degree, a PhD program wouldn't hire you for a grad student position when you can present no evidence that you know what you're doing.
I think @itslit is right on with telling you that literary scholarship is not a book club. Lots of people declare a literature major because they enjoy reading and writing and then discover that a) literary scholarship is very unlike the casual reading and writing they like to do, b) therefore they're bad at it. The other reason you shouldn't apply for PhDs right now, besides the fact that you won't get in, is that you really have no idea what literary scholarship entails. Right now you see this as an escape from the grueling coursework that I'm sure you're being put through and the scary job market, but it's also, you know, a bonafide occupation with its bad sides and long days. It seems like you think that because it's not engineering, it won't be hard - and it will be very hard, just in a different way. You really should give this project a lot more thought and work than you have.
That said, if you're still curious about transitioning, I'd try it out - but I'd try a more cautious approach. Especially since you have student debt, I'd finish the MS and get a job, then audit some literature electives at a local college. It's a cheap and efficient way to get introduced to the field, and sometimes, if you do well, the professor may be able to write you a letter of recommendation for your master's application. I don't think this transition is possible for you without a relevant master's. You certainly shouldn't pay for a master's in the humanities, by the way, but if you put in a strong enough application, you may be able to get in fully funded (which will entail TA or RA work). A master's is also a good way to taste the academic life without committing to it. Good luck!

It's not impossible to make the transition you're suggesting, @poboy, but it will require deft maneuvering on your part. As an undergraduate, I had a professor who followed the same path, albeit in South America: they earned a B.S./M.S. in a subfield of Engineering and successfully enrolled in a Spanish Literature & Culture program at a fairly well regarded school in the Northeast. But they also had the benefit of speaking Spanish as a first language and knew enough English to meet the TOEFL requirements their school had in place. It's worth noting, however, that this success story took place in the 90s, in a far different academic environment, and that they were by nature a voracious reader. They were able to pass an entrance exam despite not having completed coursework in literature, and I'm not sure if that's an option at the kinds of schools you're considering in this day and age.
While your GRE scores are certainly remarkable, you ought to heed the advice  @Warelin has offered and carefully consider how you might compete against applicants with 4–6 years of training in literary/cultural criticism and discourse analysis, students who likely know not only the base texts required of those in the field but also the seminal arguments made against them. You would be wise to read the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism before you make the plunge, as it traces in broad terms the development of literary-critical thought from the Classical Age to the present day. Likewise, I would suggest that you take the GRE Subject Test in English Literature to see how you fare; although few programs require it for admission these days, it might signal to any faculty reviewers your aptitude for and interest in the study of literature. 
And because it struck me as reductive: I would hesitate to say that "humanities majors have had a grade inflation over the years that STEM majors haven't experienced to the same extent." My training has been arduous. There have been plenty of days I have considered giving up, simply because I found the coursework and expectations too much to bear. My sheer passion for literary study and critical theory have kept me going on my darkest days, and if it weren't for my commitment and work ethic, I likely wouldn't be in the second year of my master's program. The humanities and STEM are both difficult, and I would wager that any professor of the humanities with integrity would just as quickly assign a poor grade for poor performance as any STEM professor. 
As someone in Comparative Literature, I have to ask: what are your languages? Many Comp. Lit. programs require applicants to hold superior proficiency in one to two non-English languages and reading proficiency in a third at the time admission, with the end-goal of mastery over four or more, as the discipline emphasizes reading texts in their original language (whereas English programs read world literatures in translation). 
Lastly, if after all due consideration you do elect to make this sort of shift, I would recommend that you enroll in—or at least audit—as many literature courses as your schedule permits prior to graduation, as @Warelin is correct to say that the majority of programs require 18 or more hours in literature or related fields as a consideration for admission. Because so many funded programs require their students to teach intro-level courses, it is imperative that you demonstrate mastery over the material you may be tasked with teaching. The study of literature is as wonderful as you make it seem, I assure you, but it is not book club. It is a serious, age-old discipline that should be regarded as seriously as any other. I wish you the best with your M.S., @poboy, and I encourage you to reach out should you have any further questions.

Small note here:  Programs in the humanities tend to have considerably fewer Graduate spots than programs in STEM at the majority of universities. Programs in the humanities also tend to place less value on test scores than STEM does and place a significantly higher value on your fit within the program. Columbia, Harvard, and Cornell are all great schools but they have very different things they're known for and it would be a very rare applicant that would find a fit at all of them.

Transferring from one program to another is very unlikely at the grad school level. However, you might want to check with your school regarding this. Most programs though will have you apply to their program formally and pool you with all applicants.

Most respected PHD programs will not allow you to do their program part-time. It is expected that you treat them like a priority and like it is a full-time job. This isn't meant to be something that you do because you're "dreading graduating" but rather because there is nothing else you want to do for the rest of your life.

There are some questions I think would be helpful in answering before pursuing this further:
Do you have enough experience to obtain a PHD in English or Comp lit? I think a minimum of 18 credits of English or related credits was something I recall seeing when applying for an English PHD.
What are your interests in English/Comp Lit? What theories interest you? What makes the field you're interested in studying so important?
I'd carefully consider your letters of recommendation. Programs tend to prefer letters from their field or from someone who understands what it's like to obtain a doctorate's degree in the humanities. A weak letter can hurt your chances of admission.
What's your understanding of research in the Humanities? The way we conduct research is very different from the way the sciences does.

https://tableau.cornell.edu/views/5yrAdmissionsFactsandFigures_0/AdmissionsbyCitizenship?:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no

As can be seen at the link above: Cornell had 255 applicants for English in Fall 2017. They admitted 9 percent of these applicants (which would be about 23 students that were accepted or waitlisted). Often time, top universities do compete for similiar applicants so yield is never quite 100 percent. Of the 23 students accepted, 11 accepted their offer and enrolled. At one point, Cornell advertised their average GPA to be around a 3.85. 
Scores are not everything, but Grad Schools would expect you to have more to show if you have a Master's degree in a subject. I think it has to do with the amount of opportunities you've had to professionalize and understand the field better than someone coming straight out of undergrad. In this case, scoring really high on the Literature Subject test might be advantageous to show that you're incredibly interested in the material. I would ensure that you meet the minimum requirements prior to applying anywhere though.
If you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to help you answer them.

Best of luck!

To be clear, a program being a 'cash cow' doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad or useless program. Cash cow, IMO, just means that the program is a significant source of income to the university. For example, Columbia's MBA program could be considered a cash cow program - they don't really award scholarships for it and it costs a whole lot of money. However, a Columbia MBA is pretty valuable and is quite likely to result in a high-paying salary after graduation. There may also be some academic/non-professional programs that are cash cows but also have good career prospects for students. Full funding for academic MA programs in many fields is pretty uncommon or even rare, and those programs may well be cash cows, but that doesn't mean they're entirely useless.
So it may be with your program. It's possible that the program is a cash cow, meaning it generates a lot of revenue for Columbia. But what you should worry about primarily is the cost-benefit analysis to you. You're getting funding to attend, which offsets the cost; the next step is doing what you are doing - finding out post-graduation outcomes for students. Follow up with the coordinator and ask about job placement. You can tell him your career aspirations and see what their response is.
Also, I'm not trying to be pedantic but anecdotes are, indeed, data. They're just data that you have to consider within context, since there are lots of factors that could influence a person's eventual career journey. My point is that you don't need to disregard anecdotes or individual people's outcomes; you do need to seek out a variety, though, so you can learn what's out there.

I've gone ahead and moved this to the Philosophy forum for you. In the future, feel free to message me if you've posted in the wrong forum.

Ahh, that does seem a bit more extreme. I ended up sending a query to a journal today. They responded within a few hours.
Sorry to hear that it took them months to reply to you. =(

Contacting POIs is something that is more important in the sciences than in the humanities due to the way funding is handled. Some programs in the humanities also have policies on whether or not they're allowed to reply to your inquiry in order to keep things neutral. Part of this could be the reason that you're not getting a response. Also, professors are incredibly busy people and it's midterm season so a lot of them have their focus on that.

Regarding reapplying, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't re-apply. Each committee is going to have different things they consider important and will weigh things differently. Their interests in the department could also change. They could be looking for something that a previous class lacks and each cohort's pool with be different from the previous year.
I see that you applied to a wide range of programs last year. What specifically are you interested in studying? History, Art History and Anthropology have very different approaches.

Have you looked into MA programs inside the USA that are funded? Being in a funded program will allow you to focus on your application for the PHD without having to worry about finances for moving countries, living expenses and such.

I think there are a few notes that need to be added here to better understand how "rankings" are determined.

From USNews regarding Grad School rankings in the humanities:
For the surveys conducted in fall 2016, Ipsos sent each school offering a doctoral program two surveys per discipline. Questionnaires were sent to department heads and directors of graduate studies in economics, English, history, political science, psychology, and sociology – or, alternatively, a senior faculty member who teaches graduate students – at schools that had granted a total of five or more doctorates in each discipline during the five-year period from 2011 through 2015, as indicated by the National Center for Education Statistics' Completions survey.
These are the number of schools with doctoral programs surveyed in fall 2016: economics (138); English (155); history (151); political science (120); psychology (255); and sociology (118). And these were the response rates: economics (23 percent), English (14 percent), history (15 percent), political science (24 percent), psychology (14 percent) and sociology (33 percent)."
What this essentially means is that 14 percent of DGS/Department heads decided the rank of 155 programs. This is problematic because a lot of DGS know very little of programs besides their closest peers. The DGS is often a rotating position at many schools which could also explain the low response rate. Department heads generally aren't paid to pay attention to graduate school so their knowledge may be even less.

More detailed information about Grad rankings in the humanities could be found here.
By contrast, School rankings at the undergrad level are done using a completely different methodology. 

For 2019, the following were considered for overall school rankings at the undergrad level:
Outcomes (35 percent)
Faculty Resources (20 percent)
Expert Opinion (20 percent) 
15 of the 20 points of this is based on assessments from Presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions. Their job generally involves keeping up to date of what other programs are doing. The remaining 5 points of this category are based on high-school counselor surveys. Their job generally involves helping students find great fits for them. Financial Resources (10 percent)
Student Excellence (10 percent)
Alumni Giving (5 percent)

More detailed information about undergrad rankings could be found here.

With that out of the way, the number of applicants varies greatly by school. Applicants have different things they consider important when applying.  Some people will only consider applying to the top 10 universities (despite on whether or not there are professors that fit what they do), some are restricted to applying to certain areas, some need a big city, some consider weather to be important, some need to be somewhere more rural, some have partners to consider, some are limited by time or funding, some refuse to live with roommates so they want to ensure that stipends will be able to cover this. There are many more factors that will influence how many programs they're willing to research to determine fit. A lower applicant count does not mean a place is less competitive. It's possible that the majority of New York University's are filtered out due to it being a terrible fit and people being more interested in living in New York City than it does with what NYU could specifically provide to that student that others can't. I imagine that schools with fewer applicants get more serious applicants that have really specific reasons on why they're applying to that school.
Application season is something that I'm not sure we'll ever understand. I was rejected by schools that accepted a greater number of applicants. I was accepted by schools that accept less than 5 percent of their applicants. Fit is the most important thing in admissions and that fit changes each year based on what the department is interested in, what gaps they're hoping to fill from previous years and where they're heading.

Contacting POIs is something that is more important in the sciences than in the humanities due to the way funding is handled. Some programs in the humanities also have policies on whether or not they're allowed to reply to your inquiry in order to keep things neutral. Part of this could be the reason that you're not getting a response. Also, professors are incredibly busy people and it's midterm season so a lot of them have their focus on that.

Regarding reapplying, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't re-apply. Each committee is going to have different things they consider important and will weigh things differently. Their interests in the department could also change. They could be looking for something that a previous class lacks and each cohort's pool with be different from the previous year.
I see that you applied to a wide range of programs last year. What specifically are you interested in studying? History, Art History and Anthropology have very different approaches.

I think the first question you need to ask yourself is this: What do you want to do in life and will a Master's degree help you achieve this?

If it will, what type of Master's degree will help you reach your goal? Once you have that answer, look into programs that will help you reach that goal.

Not everyone needs a Master's degree though. And it should never be something that should be done because you're trying to avoid something else or are unsure of what to do. Rather, it should be something that you want to do.

I think we're in an era of a lot of changes coming to grad schools. Policies are changing due to changes in USA law. Some schools are dropping GRE requirements or are in the middle of revamping how they choose who to admit or how their curriculum to work. Many of us remain active in our own forums. On the Literature forum, there wasn't much of ad admin presence in the past; now there is.There are other forums that lacked much of an admin presence but now have one. I'm wondering if the reason you feel that we're less active is because we're active on different forums?
While the previous admins had a lot of knowledge in the Sciences, a lot of us are more comfortable with the Humanities. As a result, I think the knowledge that we feel comfortable sharing is very different from previous admins. I think we're all making an effort to be active on different forums but we don't want to give any misleading advice.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention,  @indecisivepoet. I've looked into the previous edits and it looks like the 22k figure was grabbed from https://www.bio.fsu.edu/grad/handbook/financial.html which is for Biological Sciences. I've always found that number strange since I've always thought Florida State's stipend was around 15k. Would love the number to be updated if @renea has more accurate information.

I think that's a good way to narrow down your list so you can get a better understanding of the dynamics in departments.

I think we're in an era of a lot of changes coming to grad schools. Policies are changing due to changes in USA law. Some schools are dropping GRE requirements or are in the middle of revamping how they choose who to admit or how their curriculum to work. Many of us remain active in our own forums. On the Literature forum, there wasn't much of ad admin presence in the past; now there is.There are other forums that lacked much of an admin presence but now have one. I'm wondering if the reason you feel that we're less active is because we're active on different forums?
While the previous admins had a lot of knowledge in the Sciences, a lot of us are more comfortable with the Humanities. As a result, I think the knowledge that we feel comfortable sharing is very different from previous admins. I think we're all making an effort to be active on different forums but we don't want to give any misleading advice.

I think we're in an era of a lot of changes coming to grad schools. Policies are changing due to changes in USA law. Some schools are dropping GRE requirements or are in the middle of revamping how they choose who to admit or how their curriculum to work. Many of us remain active in our own forums. On the Literature forum, there wasn't much of ad admin presence in the past; now there is.There are other forums that lacked much of an admin presence but now have one. I'm wondering if the reason you feel that we're less active is because we're active on different forums?
While the previous admins had a lot of knowledge in the Sciences, a lot of us are more comfortable with the Humanities. As a result, I think the knowledge that we feel comfortable sharing is very different from previous admins. I think we're all making an effort to be active on different forums but we don't want to give any misleading advice.

I would imagine those schools are trying to get a more diverse pool of applicants. For a variety of reasons, applicants from underrepresented backgrounds often score lower on the GRE. Applicants from more traditionally represented backgrounds also may perform below their potential, too, depending on the circumstances around their test day. I don't know what the current science is around GRE scores and success in graduate school, but my guess is that GRE scores aren't highly correlated with who finishes a PhD program or who achieves success (like papers, posters, fellowships, etc.) within the program - because the GRE doesn't really test domains that contribute to that success, not directly anyway. There are a couple of more recent articles that address this, like one in Science Mag (https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/06/gres-dont-predict-grad-school-success-what-does), and this journalistic one in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-problem-with-the-gre/471633/).
I don't think the GRE has ever been very important to admissions to doctoral programs. The old wisdom was that GRE scores can keep you out, but they can't get you in - in other words, usually once you cross some threshold (usually unsaid, although some programs will recommend a general minimum to shoot for) they don't do any additional work to boost your admissions, but scoring below that threshold can be damaging to your application. But even that can be bent - if an otherwise really outstanding applicant has mediocre GRE scores, that can be overlooked.
Given the lack of predictive power in all the axes that doctoral admissions committees actually care about, I guess some professors/program are like why force good potential candidates to spend a couple hundred dollars, several months of studying, and a few hours of stressful high-stakes testing on something that's not really going to help them evaluate the candidate at all?

I think your post means well but I'm not sure how useful it is when applying to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. 

Humanities tend to rely significantly less on stats than than Math does and relies more on "fit". The same applicant could submit the same application to 12 programs one year and get rejected from all 12. They could reapply next year and get into a number of schools that previously rejected them. Departments change. And the applicants they're looking for also change from year to year. You might get rejected from a school ranked T150, T100, T80, T60 but get accepted into a T40 , T20, and T30 school. You might also end up rejecting the T20 and T30 school for the T40 simply because it's a better fit. 

We've also seen people with perfect GRE scores and GPAs from ivy league institutions get rejected from every single school they've applied to. Writing matters. Interests matter.

I think your post means well but I'm not sure how useful it is when applying to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. 

Humanities tend to rely significantly less on stats than than Math does and relies more on "fit". The same applicant could submit the same application to 12 programs one year and get rejected from all 12. They could reapply next year and get into a number of schools that previously rejected them. Departments change. And the applicants they're looking for also change from year to year. You might get rejected from a school ranked T150, T100, T80, T60 but get accepted into a T40 , T20, and T30 school. You might also end up rejecting the T20 and T30 school for the T40 simply because it's a better fit. 

We've also seen people with perfect GRE scores and GPAs from ivy league institutions get rejected from every single school they've applied to. Writing matters. Interests matter.

I can assure you that your GPA will be the least important thing in your admissions decisions. I think you stand a really good chance if you can showcase how your major in Economics and International Affairs has influenced you to become interested in obtaining an advanced degree in History. Best of luck!

I heavily encourage you to look into 2 year MA programs in History or in a subfield of history that you're most interested in. There are a number of reasons I'd recommend a 2 year program over a 1 year program:
2 years will allow you to gain a better understanding of your interest and discover new interests that you may never knew existed. This will allow you to gain more time to present at conferences in your field Two years also allows your professors to know you more and encourage you to submit to conferences in your field that you may not have been aware from. Grad schools might also have funding set aside that you can apply for so you can present at such conferences This will allow you to take a full year of courses to figure out who you could ask to write your letters of recommendation If your ultimate goal is to obtain a PHD in the USA, professors in the USA are more accustomed to the PHD process here. While the job market remains rough, it's easier to land a tenure-track job if it's from the same country you graduated from

Have you looked into MA programs inside the USA that are funded? Being in a funded program will allow you to focus on your application for the PHD without having to worry about finances for moving countries, living expenses and such.