Academic freedom and global student mobility are both topics high on the scientific and political agenda. However, the relationship between transnational student mobility and academic freedom in national higher education systems has not yet been investigated cross-nationally. This study intends to answer the question on how a countries' level of academic freedom impacts on its' attractiveness as a study destination. We analyse this connection from a network analytic perspective. While our data covers 167 countries as receivers and senders, our network analysis takes the attributes of countries and their relationship to each other into account in order to estimate the net effect of academic freedom ties in the network of global student mobility. We expect global student mobility to be directed from countries with low levels of academic freedom to countries with high levels of academic freedom. At the same time, academic freedom might be an attractive characteristic of a country to retain students in its domestic higher education system.