Invisible care, unequal trajectories: university student caregivers in Italy

Abstract This article investigates the experiences of university students who provide informal care to dependent family members in Italy, a population that remains largely overlooked in both sociological research and higher education policy. Drawing on qualitative data from focus groups conducted at the University of Parma (Italy), the study examines how caregiving responsibilities intersect with academic trajectories, shaping students’ everyday lives, identities, and future orientations. The findings show that student caregiving generates cumulative disadvantages that disrupt educational pathways and reconfigure temporal horizons. Participants describe lives marked by uncertainty, fragmentation, and a persistent tension between academic demands and non-negotiable care obligations. These conditions produce not only material constraints—such as delayed milestones and reduced participation—but also emotional burdens, including loneliness, guilt, shame and anxiety. Rather than being individual challenges, these dynamics are rooted in processes of institutional misrecognition: caregiving is naturalized within the private sphere and remains largely invisible within academic structures. As a result, students tend to internalize their difficulties as personal failure, while their needs remain unaddressed. While participants mobilize significant personal resources to sustain their studies, reliance on individual resilience risks obscuring the structural nature of these inequalities. By conceptualizing student caregiving as an under-recognized source of inequality, the article contributes to sociological debates on higher education and caregiving, and highlights the need for institutional responses grounded in formal acknowledgment, collective responsibility, and the capacity to recognize and address non-standard needs.