The demand for education and qualification rise in today's knowledge-based societies. Higher education must be made accessible to those groups who have traditionally participated less, e.g. immigrants or people from non-academic background. Within the European research project OPULL - Opening Universities for Lifelong Learning - which aims to deduce success factors of how Higher Education Institutions (HEI) can successfully open up to non-traditional students, a cross-sectional study was set up with a total sample of 935 students from various non-traditional groups in German, Danish and Finnish universities. In addition to socio-demographic variables, data on their motivation, academic self-concept and study satisfaction was collected. This paper discusses possible differences between the native and foreign populations based on these variables. Migrants are more likely to have higher educational aspirations even in studies controlling for social background and school grades. Suggested explanations are immigrant optimism, social networks or deficit of knowledge of educational systems. This implies that migrants might have a higher academic self-concept, motivation, occupational aspirations and/or, might felt more secure at the start of their studies. The analysis of the data is testing these hypotheses. Further, we seek to find out whether students' confidence in their ability to study lasts over the course of the study period, e.g. if they warm up (increase) or cool off (decrease). To analyze the research questions, univariate and multivariate statistics are calculated. Data analysis is still in progress but univariate statistics are revealing interesting differences between native and foreign populations and participating countries.