The paper reviews the regulatory issues in the field of higher education as related to the improvement of personnel training quality based on enhancing the classification of professional educational programs in the Russian Federation. The features of the current state of higher education in Russia, the problems and possible prospects for transformations in this area, as well as the main stages of fulfilling the task of transforming the higher education professional educational programs are discussed. The liberalization of federal state educational standards of higher education and the increased independence of higher education institutions during the development of educational programs taking into account professional standards indicate the need to create an updated classification system for the Russian education. The classification system being developed should become a common one for all types of professional educational programs, including professional training programs and additional professional programs. The paper proposes new approaches to the system structure and basic classification levels of the List of specialties and areas of training, as to the establishment of the conditions for training personnel with higher education on an interdisciplinary basis, taking into account the common subject content of professional activities and providing the conditions for the existence of enlarged groups of specialties and areas of training.