I was planning on applying for 2019 but I was wondering what my life would be like if I ended up attending…
I recently toured NYU with my daughter, so I have this one limited experience to go off, but we did tour the library and many other common areas for several hours and the school seemed to be well over half “minority”… many beautiful skin tones in abundance at NYU! Good luck to you Daydreamer1 
From my experience, both NYU and NYC are super diverse places in general–however, I’m not black so I can’t really speak to the experience, nor do I want to talk over people who are. What I can say is that the class admitted in 2018 was the most diverse in history, with a 33% increase in the amount of black students accepted, and I assume NYU will continue this trend! We also have a really active Black Student Union as well as many other popular cultural clubs. NYU also takes things like racism really seriously and has a 24/7 bias response line to report incidences to, and cares a lot about keeping all students safe and comfortable.
At NYU the people would be accepting and you’d probably find great friends, however as an FYI – this goes for everyone applying to NYU regardless of your race or ethnicity – the FA is terrible there. Just be prepared. for that. The Net price calculator has been known to be inaccurate as well. Also NYU doesn’t have a campus center. The school is spread out and can make people feel less of a natural community than at a school with a central campus. Also NYU doesn’t really have any big football team or other things to bring people into the same School Spriit. So regardless of your race or ethnicity, it may feel like a relatively more isolating experience compared with other schools.
For other NYC schools, with better FA, you may want to consider –
Barnard
Columbia University (Columbia College)
Vassar – up the MetroNorth line along the Hudson River. Excellent FA and easy to get to NYC. You can make daytrips to the City easily.
You may also want to look at Drew --in New Jersey – and has a NYC component to it’s curriculum.
Also, Sarah Lawrence might interest you, but I’m not clear about FA there.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that while NYU has weak athletics, if you want to play sports, school spirit and sports will be your entire world. And if you don’t want to play sports, I can also tell you with certainty that the campus is in no way isolating. From my experience it’s a lot less isolating than smaller schools in tiny areas. There’s 50k students here, statistically it’s very hard to not find your place.
It’s true that FA is horrible, which is unfortunate.