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Service-learning (SL) is a promising way to engage and support local communities, educate students as holistic citizens and professionals, and strengthen the connection between higher education and society. However, within engineering education, SL as a pedagogy often falls short of reaching its full potential as a transformational pedagogy. To further our understanding of why SL, in the context of engineering, remains limited, this research characterizes: 1) implicit beliefs about engineering in students’ descriptions of their SL experiences, and 2) the ways in which students’ beliefs manifest within the context of SL in engineering. Our data include rich, contextual descriptions of SL experiences, which enabled us to generate insight into students’ implicit beliefs about engineering and how they manifest in SL contexts. We used an inductive, qualitative approach to analyze focus group and interview data. We found that students predominantly draw on three implicit beliefs about engineering when engaged in SL experiences: (1) Engineering is predominantly technical, (2) Engineering requires deliverables or tangible products, and (3) Engineers are the best problem solvers. These beliefs often manifested problematically, such that they promote university-centered and apolitical SL practice, while reinforcing social hierarchy, leading to community exploitation in support of student development. This study produces empirical evidence that such implicit beliefs are a mechanism that limits the potential of SL by hindering community-centric and justice-oriented practice. However, some students demonstrated their ability to disrupt these beliefs, thereby showing the potential for SL as a pedagogy in engineering to surface implicit and counterproductive beliefs about engineering and achieve SL goals. The beliefs that are salient in SL and the concrete ways in which they manifest for students have implications for how SL is practiced in engineering and the experiences of both students and partner communities. These beliefs impact the extent to which the socio-political elements of the service are addressed, the extent to which SL is university- versus community-centric, and the quality and extent to which the engineering solution is aligned with social justice. The implications of these findings lead to recommendations for future research on how engineering educators might explicitly design SL curricula to identify, address, and dismantle problematic beliefs before they manifest in problematic ways in SL contexts.