This article explores the emotional responses to higher education of students with dependent children, and draws on 68 in-depth interviews conducted with student-parents in universities in the UK and Denmark. By focussing on one specific emotion--guilt--it contends that emotions are important in helping to understand the way in which particular groups of students engage with education, and the barriers they often face. Moreover, by considering four different higher education contexts (across two European nations), it suggests that emotional responses are spatially differentiated, and mediated by national policies and norms as well as the social characteristics of students.