Listen to your second thoughts, and listen to your dad.
Your mom just doesn’t want to close any doors for you. It’s very hard for parents to admit to limitations in what they can offer their children. But what your dad is saying is the objective truth: they can afford 50K/year without loans. UCSD is affordable. NYU is not.
If you can’t, I can! You are falling victim to Familiarity Breeds Contempt Syndrome. UCSD is excellent and well-respected. NYU is also well-respected, but for general humanities type stuff, it isn’t undeniably better. And absolutely, irrefutably not more-than-double-the-cost, six-figures-of-debt better. Not remotely. If you had been admitted to an NYU BFA program (film, performing arts, etc.), then this might be a conversation to have (although it would still be unaffordable). But you’re not… and that also means that the film opportunities you’re imagining would really not be accessible to you there. You’d be spending your entire actual college budget, plus an extra $160K+ that you don’t have, to get a general liberal arts degree in the general vicinity of people who get to study film. This makes exactly zero sense. You’d have better film opportunities at UCSD, where you could actually opt to major or minor in film studies if you chose to.
And there are many NYU students, especially those who don’t arrive with NYC cultural competency, who feel isolated at this very-urban campus, even when they start in the fall with their class. A spring start would make it even harder to find community.
The starting salaries data is mostly a red herring, as it reflects the proportions of students in high-ROI majors more than it reflects the effect of attending one school over the other. But would your prospects in particular be any better at NYU vs. UCSD? No.
For 160K, you could move to NYC after graduating from UCSD, and cover your rent for 3-4 years while breaking into the career of your choice.
NYU makes no sense. UCSD at in-state rates is an incredible value and opportunity. You could achieve anything there that you could at NYU, and probably more.