The article, taking into account the Russian and global trends in the development of society, explores the urgent problem of overcoming the negative consequences of global crises in the economy, politics, culture and education. Growing competition makes special demands on the quality of higher education in these areas. In this regard, representatives of state structures and business community see in a modern university graduate a socially mature personality raising its professional skills, as well as a competent and competitive employee with special knowledge and skills in the field of innovative technologies, with creative thinking and professional mobility. The purpose of the study is to identify the reasons for the low level of the university students’ professional and personal competitiveness formation and the empirical justification for effective ways to improve the quality of education. In this case, competitiveness is determined by the ability to actively mobilize personal qualities and the willingness to build a strategy of professional activity in accordance with the systemic targets of the university's educational process. The research methods were the theoretical and pedagogical analysis of the current state of the competitiveness forming process; included and unincorporated surveillance; content analysis of students’ creative works; diagnostic methods, including generalization of independent characteristics, data of mutual and self-evaluation. Several reasons for the insufficiently high level of student professional and personal development are revealed: individual psychological; organizational; training; material and technical; social; material and household, etc. The definition of professional competitiveness is formulated – readiness for competently built labor activity, targeted achievement of planned results on the basis of effective realization of creative, intellectual and personal potential. The conclusions are drawn about the need to search for new approaches to design, theoretical and empirical verification of goals and objectives, as well as the need to comprehend the totality of internal and external factors of the formation of professional and personal student competitiveness in the educational process of a modern university.