Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Ashe

Ashe frames college affordability as a national self-harm, not a private misfortune. The line is built like a clean tennis point: quick setup ("bright young minds"), a hard pivot ("can't afford"), then the winner ("America pays the price"). It turns the usual meritocratic script on its head. Talent, he implies, is common; access is not. And when access fails, the loss doesn t stay neatly with the kid who got priced out. It ripples outward into weaker innovation, thinner civic leadership, and a society that wastes its own potential.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the comfortable idea that education is a consumer good. Ashe makes it a public utility in all but name, arguing that the country has a stake in who gets to learn. "Bright young minds" is strategic: it flatters the American obsession with giftedness while sidestepping culture-war traps about "handouts". If even the obviously capable are blocked by cost, then the system is not merely unfair; it is inefficient.

Context matters. Ashe came of age when universities were opening up under civil rights pressure, then watched the ladder get pulled up as tuition rose and public funding thinned. As a Black athlete who moved in elite spaces while staying alert to exclusion, he knew how often "opportunity" is a slogan masking a gate. His warning is patriotic in tone but unsparing in diagnosis: a nation that prices out promise is choosing decline.