<p>Between 2019 and 2023, Turkey experienced a significant rise in housing prices. Inflation-adjusted rents more than doubled in some regions, making it a standout case of global house price inflation. This study analyses the impact of a strong exogenous shock, Turkey’s unprecedented and uneven surge in rental prices, on students’ educational mobility. More than one million high school graduates annually face the critical decision whether to stay local or relocate to another province for university education. Using a comprehensive panel dataset covering all higher education programs across Turkey’s 81 provinces, the analysis employs two-way fixed effects estimation to isolate the effect of median monthly rent on the share of out-of-province students enrolled in each program. The results reveal that rising rental prices significantly reduce inter-provincial student mobility. A 100 TL/sqm increase in median monthly rent (in 2023 prices) reduces the openness rate of public university programs by 2.96% points. The effect is concentrated in programs with lower entry scores, where the same shock reduces the openness rate by 11.53% points, equivalent to nearly one in five out-of-province students no longer making the move. Programs with higher entry scores remain unaffected. The analysis of private university programs confirms this pattern: rental price increases significantly reduce mobility in tuition-paying programs, while full-scholarship programs (attended by the highest-scoring students) are unaffected. These findings suggest that the housing market functions as a stratifying force within an expanding higher education system, disproportionately restricting the geographic mobility of students with lower academic performance, who are more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds. </p>