I was at an innovation conference recently where speaker after speaker declared that the US was producing too few engineers. The premise was buoyed by statistics, the most frequently quoted being that China was graduating seven times as many engineers as we were.

The general malaise of the American student was further underscored by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the highly-original Segway, the stand-up two-wheel transporter, which is a life-size object lesson in the gyroscope. He pointed out that while the US graduated some 64,000 engineers last year, these were easily eclipsed by the number of bachelors degrees we awarded in the popular major of sports management. That’s right. We are producing more degrees in sports management than in all of engineering.

I could go on, but for every statistic, the punchline remains the same. However, it’s only relevant if you accept the premise that America isn’t producing enough engineers.

Which got me to thinking.

Part of what fuels this is the idea that the health of our economy is driven by innovation, and certainly, the last century is a tribute to this logic. Still, we have more to sell than innovation, and the fact of the matter is, technology has shaped our economy in countless ways.

How many farmers do we have today? Far fewer than we did a century ago. Thanks to technology and innovation, we now produce far more food with far less people. So could it be that with the technology we are developing today – and surely will develop tomorrow – we can produce more innovation with fewer engineers?

You see, I hear guest after guest on Tech Nation describe how they are now more productive than ever with many fewer people … all thanks to technology. And if we add in that show-stopping statistic provided by Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network, that 85% of all the engineers who have ever lived are alive today, you have to wonder – do we really need to uptick how many engineers we produce each year?

Look – I am an engineer, so I’m not advocating we be phased out any time soon. But I don’t think it hurts to ask a few questions: Is innovation a numbers game? How much of this premise is competition for competition’s sake? Is it an ego-centric fear that America might lose its premier status as innovator to the world?

I’m in the middle of a great re-thinking, but I can offer this: Why not be focused on making sure everyone who wants to become an engineer gets to be one? A female who stopped taking math midway through high school can’t switch to engineering midway through college. The child of poor immigrants for whom English is a second language has no one to turn to for high-school Algebra. And a black youth, seeing less and less point in even staying in school, is hardly disposed to signing up for more math.

To this end, Kristina Johnson, the Dean of Engineering at Duke, makes a cogent point: We make college students take English – why not also make them take math? And she’s right. The road to engineering is paved with bricks of math. If we can all somehow buy into math – as a society – than we can be assured that everyone who might want to an engineer, can be.

As for how many engineers we should be producing – and whether or not we have to keep up with the Jones’s (or would that be Wong’s?) – that’s going to take some more thought.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.