That translates into a $2,081 increase over this year’s tuition of $35,283, according to the financial aid department.

Students are outraged.

“It’s definitely putting a damper in my parents’ pocket,” said Emmanuella Durandisse, a 19-year-old freshman from Nyack. “I’m definitely mad. Maybe the teachers are overpaid.”

The school’s president, John Sexton, blamed the hike on the size of the college’s endowment.

“Many colleges and universities against which we compete to attract faculty and students have endowment resources per student many times larger,” he wrote in an e-mail to the faculty.

The school is not insensitive to the financial strain. It plans a 12 percent financial aid boost for the neediest students.

But that’s still not as much help as other private colleges, such as Harvard, are giving out. The Ivy League school plans to actually cut tuition for low-income students.

“We are not in a position to match these institutions, as much as we might wish that all endowments are created equal,” Sexton wrote.

The cost of NYU certainly puts it in league with Ivy-level tuition. Columbia University charges students $35,516, while Harvard charges $31,456.

The proposal follows a failed push by Assembly Democrats to raise the personal income taxes of people earning more than $1 million a year.

. . .

The new version, developed by the Fiscal Policy Institute and other organized-labor activists, is a city tax, not a state tax, and would therefore have to be first approved by the City Council as a “home-rule” message and then voted on by the state Legislature. It is also smaller in scope. The plan’s crafters say it would raise about $200 million a year, compared to the $1.2 billion a year haul that was expected from the income tax hike.

. . .

Advocates of the tax hike said it would make it easier for city lawmakers to balance the city budget, which is due July 1, without having to rely on additional cuts to services or agencies.

“If the city sends a home-rule message and it expresses its desire to close this loophole and to tax private equity and hedge fund firms the same way they tax a freelancer or small firm, I don’t know why the Senate would be opposed to it,” a Democratic assemblyman of Queens, Rory Lancman, said. The primary force behind both proposals is the labor-financed Working Families Party, a third party that has been a source of political and financial support for lawmakers who are taking up the measure, including City Council members Robert Jackson of Manhattan and Hiram Monserrate of Queens,

“I would think that this has a decent chance,” the executive director of the Working Families Party, Daniel Cantor, said. “We’re talking about a few dozen people who are basically stealing a couple of hundred million dollars from the city.”

City lawmakers and labor organizers are unveiling the plan with a rally today on the steps of City Hall. In 2005 at least 34 of the 51 members of the New York City Council had run on the Working Families Party line.

It’s yet another sign that some bankers are slashing spending on luxury items as they fear for their jobs and the value of their firms’ shares.

“We only had about $50,000 worth of final touches [to go], and the wife called me last week and said stop,” said interior designer Darren Henault, whose work has been featured in Vanity Fair and Elle Decor.

In New York City, it’s also seen as an opportunity.

For many of the city’s middle class, especially those in the creative class, who have felt sidelined as the city seemed to become a high-priced playground for Wall Street bankers, the implosion of the brokerage house Bear Stearns raises a tantalizing possibility: participation in an economy they have been largely shut out of.

Few romanticize the nearly bankrupt New York of the 1970s or the recession of the late 1980s. But if the city suffers an economic downturn, as many now predict, there are fantasies of New York returning to a pre-Gilded Age, before the average Manhattan apartment cost $1.4 million, SAT tutors charged $500 an hour and dinner entrees crossed the $40 threshold.

Andre Anderson, 34, an account executive at TheDeal.com, a financial news Web site, would like to buy a Manhattan apartment with his girlfriend, but he said their combined incomes still make it nearly impossible to afford one.

Like many, he is rooting for what could be called a Bear Stearns discount, as newly unemployed financiers cut back on the buying binges that inflate the cost of life in the city.

“If there is greater good for everyone, is it worth a few people losing their jobs?” Mr. Anderson asked. “I think so. I hate to see people lose their jobs, but prices in the city have become ridiculous.”

. . .

New York City has always been defined by the yawning gap between its haves and have-nots. But the last 15 years have witnessed the rise of a class of financiers whose salaries and bonuses have reached staggering heights. Over the last five years, the median compensation for a managing director working in investment banking rose from $650,000 to $1.37 million, according to Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm.

That is a pittance compared with hedge-fund managers. The highest-paid managers earned at least $240 million a year in 2006, according to the Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, nearly double the amount of 2005 (and up from a minimum of $30 million in 2002).