Politics & Power Quote by John Conyers

Conyers frames higher education less as a personal investment than as a civic promise, and he does it with the kind of courtroom clarity that turns policy into moral negligence. The operative verb is "neglect": not "disagree", not "prioritize differently", but fail a duty of care. That word choice is strategic. It recasts budget fights and student-aid formulas as something closer to abandonment, shifting the argument from technocratic spreadsheets to a question of who government is for.

The syntax also matters. "Have chosen" assigns agency and premeditation; it denies Republicans the usual escape hatches of deficit anxiety or bureaucratic inevitability. Conyers is signaling that austerity in education is not an unfortunate byproduct of responsible governance, but an ideological decision with predictable casualties. "Young Americans who need assistance" is equally deliberate: it centers students not as consumers shopping for degrees, but as citizens at the start of adult life, susceptible to debt and blocked mobility. The phrase "costs of higher education" nods to a structural reality that became impossible to ignore in late-20th and early-21st-century America: tuition rising faster than wages, state disinvestment, and the quiet normalization of debt as the entry fee to the middle class.

Contextually, this is classic Conyers: a House progressive using blunt moral language to draw a bright line between parties on social provision. The subtext is an indictment of an economic order that praises meritocracy while underfunding the ladders that make it plausible.