As a student of NYU, I do admit that there are a lot of stupid things wrong with NYU, but it does get unproportional amount of heat.
For one thing, NYU getting heat for having a large class size makes no sense to me. You have proportional amount of patients, and you're all split up into group practices of roughly 30 students with enough faculty, teaching assistants, and mentors available. The student environment itself is incredibly helpful. There's only about 2.5 dental schools in NYC (NYU, Columbia, and the very distant Touro). Even with nearly 400 students, they will still do close to 400 procedures by graduation (sans-covid) as they are nearly in the middle of the city at 23rd street. I posted up my cousin's progress while he was in the middle of his D4 year a few years ago and IMO it's more thank a lot of schools get by the time they graduate. He got to do over 300 procedures in 1.5 years still with 5 months left to his schooling. This is with 400 students a year. Fact is, even with the # of students, NYU is a good school clinically that emphasizes a lot on general dentistry, and that doesn't get talked about at all. Once Covid is over and everything goes back to normal, I know I will get a good clinical experience at NYU due to all the patients that go here (300k patients a year).
Secondly, tuition IS high, but people do tend to exaggerate. I made a post that disproved the 700k by studentloanplanner to which everyone disagreed with because 500k-600k was still a lot. While I agree that 600k is a lot, but 500k is not as much more expensive than other schools as you guys think since most schools are already over 400k. I also had said that 600k is not worth moving to NYC to attend this college, but some people are wealthy and some live in the city, so tuition is a non issue. I also want to reply to the person in this thread that says 35k is not enough for NYC... This is false, as I have lived in NYC for over 20 years. 35k is more than enough to live decently in the city. I reckon if you want the convenience of being 5-10 mins from the school and eat take out nearly every single day, then 35k will do just about that. If you are willing to commute from the outer boroughs and cook/meal prep, it will run you less, maybe around 20k-25k, and if you're living at home with parents, 5k is enough a year on food and metrocard. I did my research on costs before picking my dental school and found that NYU would not cost me 700k. For me, it'd be under 500k by graduation including interest, while other state schools I got into costed me about 400-420k including interest and private schools like LECOM or BU costing 450k-600k (Some would be even more than NYU since I'd have to move). I have said that if you are coming here from somewhere else, you're going to pay somewhere close to $620k and I don't recommend that but for anyone living in NYC, it can be done at a huge discount in comparison. That said, the rising tuition is problematic, but this is a problem with all dental schools not just NYU and while I do agree that NYU tuition is high, I also agree with OP that NYU gets more hate even though other privates cost just about nearly as much.
As to what NYU should actually get heat for, it is the administration. Nearly everything you read about the administration is true regarding NYU. I will forever be biased against NYU due to all the terrible administrative decisions they have made since I am here, and it really isn't that long. From rising tuition during covid to not refunding certain things to taking away our break, etc. I swear, someone from the administration is having all these meetings with student government to listen to their concerns and then do exactly the opposite of what students AND faculty want. This is the main reason why people should be turned away from NYU.