On May 8, 2013, the New America Foundation's Stephen Burd published the policy paper, "Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind."

This paper presents a new analysis of little-examined U.S. Department of Education data showing the "net price" -- the amount students pay after all grant aid has been exhausted -- for low-income students at thousands of individual colleges. The analysis shows that hundreds of public and private non-profit colleges expect the neediest students to pay an amount that is equal to or even more than their families' yearly earnings.