EN
In seeking to identify the educational and vocational aspirations of young people from rural areas, the issue of the accessibility to different levels of education takes on great significance. It is obvious that a high level of education is connected with broad horizons and a willingness to take on new ideas. In turn, the low actual level of educa-tion among people from Poland's rural areas is regarded as one of the main barriers to the development of these parts of the country. The problem is not purely one of the systemic change, since the educational gap between people from rural and urban areas was also considerable before 1989. However, the transformation being achieved since that time has if anything made accessibility to education for the rural population even more difficult. University-level education in particular would seem to be largely out of reach. The impoverishment of rural areas and financial problems might be considered two essential factors impeding accessibility to education, but these have been aug-mented by new profiles of higher education and a new educational system that has brought extensive change in the compulsory stage of education in elementary schools. The present article thus describes the unfortunate situation regarding educational levels in rural parts of Poland as of the end of the 20th century. An attempt to explain the situation in three different ways has also been made, with the issues presented concerning the economy, systemic factors and culture. While all of these are of crucial sig-nificance, it is the economic factors that have been dominant where a concentration of educational centres makes it impossible for the poor to gain access to education.