Through special funding by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2008, the Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima University has been able to implement a new research project on the reform of higher education in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century. RIHE hosted the third International Workshop on the Higher Education System under the theme of "Diversifying Higher Education Systems in the International and Comparative Perspectives," which was followed by the 38th Annual Study Meeting on the same topic. The following papers are presented at the conference: (1) Higher Educational Diversification in the United States (D. Bruce Johnstone); (2) Functional Differentiation or Hierarchical Differentiation?: The Case of Japan (Aya Yoshida); (3) The Diversification of China's Higher Education and Its Challenges (Weihe Xie); (4) Higher Education Diversification in Europe (Peter Maassen); and (5) Massification and the Growing Diversity of Higher Education (Futao Huang). Appended are: (1) Conference Program; and (2) List of Participants. Individual papers contain figures, tables, references and footnotes.