The either/or nature of your statement makes it inaccurate, as far as I'm concerned.
If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.
For some, definitely. But if, for example, Jobs had the technical skills of Wozniak, he may have spent those critical hours hacking away at the machine instead of making smart business moves and we would have ultimately never heard of his name. The lack of strong technical skills was an asset for him.
My point is that there is nothing you can do to prepare for success. Getting your engineering degree might lead you to success, but it could just as easily steer you away from success. There is no magic formula you can follow.
If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.
Both skill sets are important.