I believe NYU is need-blind for domestic applicants. Sure they are need-aware for international students, but remember that very few schools perform need-blind admission for international students, and all of them are not as expensive as NYU. So I don’t really understand your claim that NYU is taking students who can pay rather than those who are well-qualified, because they can’t know your ability to pay while reading your profile.
Sure they are stingy with financial aids, that’s why NYU’s enrollment rate is so low. NYU tends to admit way more students than it can handle, expecting many to drop out due to the expensive price tag. But it doesn’t mean that the school is giving low-income students an unfair treatment, it simply means that the school is very expensive and not for everyone, as it always has been.
I’m an American-Asian citizen, and the last two summers, I spent a lot of time in my “root” country participating and organizing many activities there. I made a lot of connections with local high school students, many of which are not applying to US colleges. And almost every students there know about NYU. Sure they’ve heard of school like Harvard, MIT or Stanford, but the fact that they don’t know what Dartmouth, UPenn, Vanderbilt,… are yet have a deep understanding of NYU really amazed me.
I think the NYU “brand” has been very good recently. I think the school is recognized as a very good school in a unique environment. The establishment of NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, and tons of NYU’s international learning centers cement NYU’s status as a “legit” higher learning institute. So I’d have to disagree with you that the NYU name is not doing well.
I’ve heard of complaints from students about academic and living quality within NYU, and maybe that’s Sexton’s fault. But that’s another story.