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Mr. KENNEDY. Three quick points, Madam President: No. 1, I rise, first, to thank the Bloomberg Foundation. I had made notes from which I was going to speak, but I lost them. So I am going to kind of wing it here.

Over the past couple of years, the Bloomberg Foundation has spent millions of dollars--I want to say the figure is $30 to $40 million--to try to help really smart kids from low-income families access some of our finest colleges in the country. And America does have the best system of higher education in the world, by the way. We have the best quality colleges.

What the Bloomberg Foundation was focusing on was that these were just really smart kids from low-income families who had great grades and great standardized test scores and great extracurricular activities, but many of them just didn't know about the opportunities that were out there in the world for them. The Bloomberg Foundation wasn't concentrating on race or gender or sexuality or a part of the country or any of those things. They were just looking to try to help really smart young women and young men in high school with great grades and great standardized test scores access some of the finest universities in the country. And they spent 40 million bucks doing it, working with some other groups.

Well, it didn't work out like they thought. They just didn't have as much success as they wanted to. But they learned from the experience.

What they learned was, in order to reach these young people, you can't just text them. You can't just call them. You can't send them an email--in part, because today, when all of us receive emails and text messages from people who we don't know, we automatically assume it is some kind of scam. So that is what Bloomberg and its contractors found--that people, including our young people, they are just very suspicious, and so they weren't able to reach that many kids. And those that they didn't reach--and by the way, the folks from Bloomberg contacting them would never meet the kids. They wanted to reach as many kids as they could, so they were doing it digitally. They just found out it wasn't that effective. But they also learned that the way to reach these kids is to see them in person and, in part, go through the kids' high schools' guidance counselors and placement offices.

So I am hoping that Bloomberg is going to start again. I am not saying that Bloomberg had no success. They had success, but it just wasn't as much success as we all wanted. But, by God, they tried, and they deserve thanks.

This wasn't any taxpayer money; it was the money of the Bloomberg foundation. They tried, and they learned a lot from it, and I wanted to thank them for trying. I hope they won't give up, and I hope they will use what they learned to try to reach these young people again.

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