The article presents the dynamics of changes in the presence of rural youth in the structure of all types of study at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 2006-2018. A key role in the transformations of higher education in this period was played by the deep demographic decline, which changed the structure of the entire higher education in Poland. This process, defined as the demasification of the university, significantly influenced the availability of higher education for rural youth, who turned out to be one of the main beneficiaries of the demographic decline. Thus, rural youth used the system's saturation effect (the concept of Effectively Maintained Inequality by S. Lucas) by urban youth (with a higher level of cultural capital) and "took" vacancies available at free public universities.