The process of globalization poses new challenges for the government in the field of education system regulation. The growing importance of the need for a qualitative assessment of the state of the educational process contributed to the development of one of the new scientific directions - the issue of quality management of higher education. Despite the fact that a lot of publications have appeared recently on improving the quality of education and the need to introduce its objective assessments, the discussion is mainly about assessing the individual achievements of students and about licensing, certification and accreditation of educational institutions, while the problem of assessing the quality of higher education is much deeper and more serious. The article is devoted to the problem of improving the quality of modern higher education in the context of the need for self-assessment, criteria for assessing quality are proposed