NYU is a school for rich kids. It's a vacation for students who want college fun, but prefer it to be in an urban setting like NYC (and the best part of NY, to be sure), rather than in a small college town with its frat parties and beer pong. IMO, it's not the ideal place to study at all. Too many distractions. If you're a liberal arts student you can probably take advantage of all the events, museums, intellectual s…
I am not from a rich family. No one in my family earned a college degree before me and they immigrated to the States with little to nothing. They were smart enough to start saving early for my education so I wouldn't have to pay a dime, but despite that, I still have loans. Thankfully I'm well on my way to paying them off, and early, because of the skills and the network I think I could have only built at NYU and NYC at large. I have the job I have because I went to NYU.
It's true that this is not the ideal place to become a hermit and focus on maximizing your GPA. I argue that higher education is far more involved than your studies - it's about exposing yourself to new experiences, honing your social senses and building a strong network, among other soft skills that are not summarized by your transcript. There are few better places in the world to do so than in NYC and specifically within NYU as a college student.
Lastly, going through NYU was not a vacation. I was very aware - as well as everyone else I knew was as well - that NYU was a ridiculously expensive place to be going to: nearly a quarter of a million dollars for an education with everything accounted for. If I screwed this up, all that money would be wasted, so study up. Not only that, study up, but resist the weakness to indulge in the "distractions" of the city and let your grades suffer.
In short, to say that NYU students are all rich kids is overgeneralizing, to think that studying in college is your one priority is myopic, and to call an NYU experience a "vacation" is just insulting. Have a little faith.