Universities are raising the spectres of Donald Trump and Brexit in a bid to tap into global fears about rising inequality as they fight a federal funding freeze.
The peak higher education body is urging politicians to keep the doors of opportunity open to all Australians, warning the effective end to demand driven funding could lead to a growing chasm in society.
"We can see how social and economic fault-lines trigger cultural and political earthquakes," Universities Australia chair Margaret Gardner will tell the National Press Club on Wednesday.
"How, as with Brexit or the most recent American presidential election, the outcomes can be unexpected. And how in their wake, sometimes voices at the far extremes of community sentiment grow louder."
The Turnbull government has frozen per-student funding in universities for 2018 and 2019, saving the budget some $2 billion and bypassing parliament to do so.
Earlier plans to cut funding in a different way were held up in the Senate after intense lobbying by the sector.
But Prof Gardner will say the opening up of universities through the demand-driven system in place since 2012, under which government pays for as many undergraduate students as institutions want to enrol, has led to tens of thousands more young Australians getting a university education who would not otherwise have done so.
She calls the funding freeze "a cap on opportunity".
"Having opened the doors of opportunity, our nation cannot afford, socially or economically, to slam them shut once more," she will say.
"Opportunity for all is our greatest insurance policy against despair and disaffection."
Earlier in the year, Universities Australia estimated there would be almost 10,000 fewer places offered to new undergraduates this year as a result of the funding freeze.
The government has disputed these figures, saying universities should be able to absorb the cuts by tightening non-teaching parts of their budgets.
