30% of MBA's are engineers, and the most common degree for CEO's is engineering. 1/3 of S&P 500 CEO's have an engineering degree, even though only a small fraction of the S&P 500 is tech companies.
Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good.
In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia.
Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.
That is, people working on actual engineering aren't really "engineers" if they have their eyes set on something else, like a higher position in acadaemia.
Suddenly everything makes sense. :)
Seriously though, where are those stats coming from?