Abstract: This article presents the results of comparative analysis of personal values of the Russian and American students. The students from the University of California, Davis (192 persons) and the students from Barnaul universities (240 persons) aged from 17 to 23 took part in the cross-cultural study. The object of this research is the value-semantic aspect of personality. The subject is the personal values during the late youth period. The work is aimed at identification of similarities and differences of personal values of the Russian and American students. The author uses the explicit methods revealing the content of values of a subject on the level of their presence in the consciousness, and implicit methods revealing the semantic hue of the values appropriated by the subject. Similarities and differences in value priorities of the representatives of various cultural groups are determined. Thus, the values of family life, love, good and faithful friends, and full self-realization are attributed as the universal cultural values; belief in God, high social status and people management, creativity, patriotism are attributes as less prioritized values. With regards to the Russian youth, the specific, culturally substantiated values are the affiliative and materialistic values, while for the students of American university – cognition of the new, nature and human, receiving higher education and value of time. The acquired results allow understanding cultural determination of personal mental development on a deeper level, as well as contributing to elaboration of the problem of values in psychology.