The purpose of the present paper is to identify the main challenges facing Kenya's public higher education system and to propose plausible and, concrete steps policy makers and educational leaders can take to address those challenges to ensure the country's higher education system prepares the human capital, which is necessary for the construction of a knowledge economy. To that end, I use the conceptual frameworks of quality and education policy borrowing to argue that Kenya can and should draw useful policy lessons from the success stories of newly industrialized economies (Brazil, China, India, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) where higher education continues to play a fundamental catalytic role in the process of social and economic transformation. Even so, I am cognizant of the fact that there are important political, cultural, historical, economic, and even geographic differences between Kenya and these newly industrialized countries and that these differences impact education policy borrowing/transfer in varied ways. The documentary review method was used to collect data. The recommendations discussed in this paper provide important insight into how Kenya's policy planners and higher education leaders might reform the public higher education system to ensure that it creates the skilled domestic workforce necessary drive economic transformation.