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This article explores the motivations guiding students with migrant backgrounds to enroll in Social Work programs in Italy. Situated within the emerging debate on university students with migrant backgrounds in Italy (Bozzetti 2018; Bertozzi 2018; Bertozzi and Lagomarsino 2019; Buonomo et al. 2024; Romito 2025) and in dialogue with research on social work students’ motivations (Stevens et al. 2012; Campanini et al. 2013; Butler-Warke et al. 2020), the paper examines how biographical trajectories, values, and professional aspirations intersect in shaping educational choices.

The analysis draws on 15 discursive interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 with students with migration backgrounds enrolled in the BA in Social Work at Sapienza University of Rome. Findings show that motivations are layered and interconnected, combining attitudinal and instrumental dimensions.

Participants’ narratives highlight the centrality of personal and professional self-realization, altruism, and a commitment to helping others, intertwined with family-transmitted values and, in some cases, encounters with welfare institutions. This orientation is conceptualized as a ‘culture of solidarity’ rooted in lived experiences and relational understanding of vulnerability and support, reflecting a collective disposition aimed at cooperation, social-justice and responsibility toward others (Schmitt 2022).

At the same time, structural constraints and external factors influence educational choice. Students are aware of limited economic resources and perceive their educational preparation as inadequate for longer and more demanding programs. In this context, Social Work is perceived as offering a professional qualification with relatively favorable labor market prospects, despite lower prestige and economic rewards compared to other professions.

In the tension between personal aspirations, moral values, and structural constraints, the emphasis on helping others can be interpreted both as an expression of agency and a search for social recognition, while also reflecting a context in which young people – especially those of migrant or working-class origin – perceive limited feasible alternatives. Rather than competing logics, solidarity-based commitments and instrumental evaluations combine into a pragmatic attitude (Christie and Kruk 1998) toward higher education. Social Work thus emerges as a pathway consistent with students' skills and aspirations, offering professional opportunities, social mobility, and employment stability (Curl et al. 2017) often unavailable to their parents.

The study also highlights the crucial role of migrant families, whose influence emerges both as a constraint and as a resource. Limited economic and cultural capital, together with reduced familiarity with the higher education system, may hinder students’ trajectories, contributing to the intergenerational reproduction of disadvantage. At the same time, families mobilize non-traditional resources, often described as ‘aspirational capital’ (Yosso 2005; Basit 2012), expressing high educational expectations despite scarce socio-economic means. This dynamic, captured by the notion of ‘immigrant optimism’ (Kao and Tienda 1998), sustains students’ ambitions to redefine their personal and collective futures and reinforces both attitudinal and instrumental motivations. The expression ‘feeling on a mission’ captures this convergence, depicting a motivational framework in which aspirations, future-oriented self-realization and the search for social recognition, contribute to (re)imagining a future of new possibilities. Recognizing this interplay is crucial for a deeper understanding of higher education choices, experiences, and expectations.