heliogabalus

Psstein, I'm not sure that's exactly the case. In at least one other discipline (classics), Yale seems to take many of their own students. It's strange because you don't see that happening so much at Harvard or Princeton. But at Yale it seems like a pattern.

All great schools. UNLV has a reputation as an exciting, up-and-coming program--and their PhD is well-regarded.
But, if you want to go into teaching--choose Notre Dame or Washington. They are better respected universities in general, and the people hiring for high schools will probably not know that UNLV has a great MFA program unless they did an MFA in creative writing themselves. 

Hi everyone.... i want to apply for MS EE for Fall 18 in the US. I already have some schools right penned down i would be applying to but my Profile aint that great so i would be open to your suggestions on these.
GPA (3.45/5.0)
GRE(Q:155, V:145 , AWA:3.0)
IELTS(L:6.5,R:6.5,W:7.0,S:8.0)
schools: Cleveland State Uni, Texas Tech Uni, Tennessee Tech Uni, Oklahoma State, Praire View A&M Uni, University of Tulsa, Southern Illinois Uni Carbondale. 

I apologize for being rude. It's just that so few people make it into Harvard's grad programs that boycotting it rings a bit hollow to me. Perhaps it isn't. I think the ballsy move would be to apply to it, get in, and then turn down the offer because of your beliefs.
That said, I'd probably apply to Harvard on principle because they took back the fellowship offer for Manning.
But I'm sorry for the tone of my original comment.

I wonder if Harvard will have to close down now.

I apologize for being rude. It's just that so few people make it into Harvard's grad programs that boycotting it rings a bit hollow to me. Perhaps it isn't. I think the ballsy move would be to apply to it, get in, and then turn down the offer because of your beliefs.
That said, I'd probably apply to Harvard on principle because they took back the fellowship offer for Manning.
But I'm sorry for the tone of my original comment.

I wonder if Harvard will have to close down now.

Chelsea Manning was also banned from entering Canada, so I hope OP isn't applying to any Canadian institutions or intending to spend any money or time on that dictatorial police state. I have a lot of sympathy for Manning because of the path she chose, but let's not kid ourselves that "not supporting Harvard" is going to be the vast systemic change needed to uproot nation-states. Harvard is an institution within an institution, and it is that higher institution that she pissed off.
If you're not applying to UVa because of Charlottesville, I have bad news for you about universities in, like, half of the country. Which is to say, maybe it's a good idea not to apply there, especially if you're POC or otherwise visibly marginalized, for your own physical safety.

Regretfully reviving an unnecessary thread--essentially for my own edification and enlightenment, partially out of preening pride and homerism. Yes, yes, the USNews English ranking is dubious for many reasons, and I will not defend its "methodology," but its results don't strike me as absurd. If nothing else, the subsequent rambles might lay groundwork for a better ranking--
(Also provoked to fall out of lockstep and complicate the "this ranking is obviously nonsense" consensus.)  
(i) The 2017 USNews ranking--at least for the incandescent brand-name schools--corresponds to (recent) placement better than, say, the NRC rankings. (That despite the greater complexity and alleged credibility of the NRC's methods.)
NRC:
1. Harvard English--#1 in NRC survey (roughly, "quality") ranking, top-5 in regression ("reputation") ranking, #1 overall 
2. Princeton and Stanford--also top-5 in both "quality" and "reputation" and top-3 overall
3. Berkeley--tip-top for "reputation," much lower for "quality" (also true for Columbia & Yale, though those departments have smaller gaps in performance between the two measures)
USNews 2017: Berkeley and Chicago > Stanford, Penn, Columbia > Michigan > Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
Recent placement (counting TT jobs and postdocs): Berkeley, Penn, Columbia, Yale, Chicago >>> Harvard, Princeton, Stanford (and Michigan, which places fourth for NRC "quality").
One would think that Berkeley, having been exposed in the NRC books as a "name without a substance," would have plummeted in rankings and estimation since 2010! (That might have been Harvard instead--Harvard, which has the Golden Name among universities, the blessing of the NRC devas, the sleekest roster of elite literary critics, and until this year top-3 status in USNews, but startlingly feeble English PhD placement since ~2009.)
(ii) Resources outside English. (One wonders how a good ranking of English departments would incorporate these.) Berkeley and Harvard have PhD minors in fields that fill many of their English departments' gaps. Berkeley's "designated emphases" include "Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies," "Critical Theory," and "Early Modern Studies," all of which English PhD candidates can study and all of which might contribute to the English department's consistent sheen in the relevant USNews sub-specialty rankings. Harvard offers "secondary fields" in areas like "African and African-American Studies" and "Medieval Studies." (Yale, Chicago, and Princeton have something similar, though perhaps less extensive and involving less intermingling of disciplines.)
(iii) Halo effect in reputation rankings. Unclear effect--I would expect Harvard and Stanford (the two "most [over]hyped schools in America, if not the world") to consistently outrank. say, Chicago and Berkeley, if the shininess of the school or of its most famous professors predominated in the rankers' evaluations.
No time to write more.
Obvious caveats/assumptions: that I have not and cannot adduce the experience of attending any of these schools to support my claims (and thus must trust what the Internet tells me); that the schools with the most breadth and depth of resources might not be the bellwethers for literary scholarship and training of graduate students; that departments' placements and other successes are endogenous (when in fact they might correlate heavily with ranking and perceived reputation); I did not attempt to anatomize each school's results in the NRC ranking.   

I wouldn't dismiss concerns about departmental rigor as mere undergrad complaining. 
When it comes to grad school acceptance, unless the person whose advice you are soliciting has the power to accept or deny your application to a program, what they can give you is just an opinion, and some opinions are certainly more informed than others. It's fair to assume that a professor at a top PhD-granting program knows the profile of a typical admitted student and can give you an accurate assessment, even if you're not applying to their program specifically; the further you get from "top PhD-granting program", the less that assumption holds. Professors at top SLACs may have excellent standing in the discipline and may regularly send their undergrads to these coveted programs, but they don't have recent first-hand experience of admitting PhD students. They don't know what the competition is like. At the majority of US institutions, which may send an undergrad to a top PhD once every decade, if at all, professors have even less experience. You can't expect them to cogently reason from a sample of one. This is not to say that OP shouldn't apply to the T20 (they should if they want an academic job). That's to say that it is possible that OP's professors *don't* know how competitive they are.
As for the thesis, that is another valid concern. Few schools have enough strong faculty to supervise the great variety of dissertation topics that students come up with. That is, a professor can monitor that the research is done properly, the argument is cogent, and similar technical things, but if they're not a subject matter expert, they're not going to know whether you raised questions that are compelling in the context of the literature, not least because they can't evaluate if you surveyed the literature properly.
The only thing I wouldn't worry about is discussion-heavy classes and OP's (implied) disdain for those of their classmates that they perceive as not having done enough work. Lower and intermediate level classes may have a heavy lecture component, but upper-level stuff (seminars) is almost always done in a discussion format, at all schools I am familiar with, because its major goal is to teach you to do your own research and construct your own arguments (the difference, I assume, being that, at stronger programs, the goal is to assess your ability to do research and construct arguments, as you will have been doing that in your lower-level classes already), and because it's assumed that you're mature enough to have more control over your learning. This is the crucial part. The reality is, you can scrape by in any major, at any school. If you're content doing the minimum to stay afloat, you shouldn't be going to grad school. If you feel that you haven't been challenged, find ways to challenge yourself. 
Try to get someone who is an expert in your specific area to take a look at your diss (it's a longshot, sure...). They'll be able to tell you if it's good work content-wise.

But if the rankings are commonly accepted as garbage, why should they reflect on the quality of your credentials one way or another? Similarly, what about the first-gen, low-income, nontraditional students of color who were accepted into highly respected schools that did not place well on these rankings? Should they feel as upset as you are satisfied? If so, doesn't it seem like a zero-sum game wherein everybody has a lot of emotions and nobody wins?

Doesn't this sort of depend on the purpose of the foreign language requirement? If it's just to prove that you have the ability to communicate with/learn another language, then certainly it should count. However, I think most departments in the humanities view the language requirement as a research tool. Xhosa is unquestionably a different language, but it's probably not going to be very helpful if I want to study ancient Athenian tragedy. So, I suspect that most departments that disallow it do so not because they don't think ASL is a language, but rather because they don't see it as a viable research tool.
(note: I'm not trying to take a stand on the issue here, but this does seem to be what's at stake)

LOL holy shit you're a genius. THANK YOU. I can't believe I didn't know this! 

Polish since it was the native language of a major Victorian/Modernist writer. If Conrad wasn't influenced by Polish literature, it would at least be interesting to see how the Poles viewed him.

Polish since it was the native language of a major Victorian/Modernist writer. If Conrad wasn't influenced by Polish literature, it would at least be interesting to see how the Poles viewed him.

You wouldn't get into a Classics post-bac without some Latin and Greek. They're really for people who have 3 years of Latin and 1 of Greek, or maybe 2 and 2. Check out Berkeley and CUNY's intensive summer Latin programs.

You wouldn't get into a Classics post-bac without some Latin and Greek. They're really for people who have 3 years of Latin and 1 of Greek, or maybe 2 and 2. Check out Berkeley and CUNY's intensive summer Latin programs.

You wouldn't get into a Classics post-bac without some Latin and Greek. They're really for people who have 3 years of Latin and 1 of Greek, or maybe 2 and 2. Check out Berkeley and CUNY's intensive summer Latin programs.

To be fair, with the amount of tuition Columbia charges most of their MFA students you should be able to take any class you damn well like.

To be fair, with the amount of tuition Columbia charges most of their MFA students you should be able to take any class you damn well like.

SFSU. CCA may be prestigious (I don't really know) for visual arts, but it's not a top creative writing program. That is fine, and if it were a perfect place for you and your writing, I'd say go for it. But SFSU is better known to writers (esp. for poetry). Also, the teaching certification is key. You will come out of the program with a possible career-qualification. Most people getting MFAs do not and are in a panic when it's time to pay back student loans. If you feel you need to do an MFA, SFSU is, in my opinion, a much smarter choice.

Tulane did fairly well for a school whose English PhD has been suspended for the last 12 years. I mean, it's no Bryn Mawr, but it's nothing to sniff at.

<< Students are not able to take incompletes, and if exams are failed more than once, you are "terminated from the program". This seems a bit severe.>>
It will also probably get you out of there with a PhD in 5-6 years. In a weird way, these sound like good things to me. And they obviously believe you can do it if they're throwing that much money at you. I have absolutely no dog in this fight, but look at it this way--NYU is willing to give you the same amount of money as many assistant professors are offered. For me--unless I hated New York and it would be prohibitively expensive--that would put NYU far ahead of Cornell.

My experience may be different than others', but it always seemed to me that professors--because they don't make huge amounts of money--are borderline obsessed with well-paid positions and fellowships. Whenever a program's reputation begins to skyrocket, it's often because they've secured a way to pay professors or grad students better. So when calculating a program's prestige, I would consider a lucrative fellowship to raise the ranking significantly.

NYU is a very well-respected institution (just by virtue of being in NYC they are always going to be able to attract top talent for faculty; the fact that they have deep pockets helps too). Cornell is too, but while it is probably significantly stronger in Medieval Lit than NYU, is it really that much better in Theory at this point? I can't imagine it is--especially if you start taking NYU's Philosophy program into account. Basically, if in 2013 Cornell was ranked at 8 and NYU was 20, in 2017 I bet they're closer and an additional $22,000 on offer would probably tip the scales in NYU's favor reputation-wise.

Small but important point: If you take a look at NYU's philosophy department, I think you'll see that they don't have much to offer someone interested in "Theory". In fact, I suspect that much of the work done in that department is rather hostile to "Theory". NYU is certainly a strong place for people with the theoretical interests that the OP has, but I don't think you'll be finding it in the philosophy department.