I was looking at usnews rankings for undergraduate engineering, and I’m confused why it’s separated into doctorate offered or not. Isn’t doctorate what you get after finishing graduate school, so why does it matter for undergraduates? If the doctorate is not considered in rankings, how do the ones where doctorate is not offered compare to the ones where it is offered?
If you yourself are planning to eventually get a doctorate, then you should look at doctorate granting schools for undergrad: better research opportunities. If not, as long as the program is ABET accredited you will be fine.
There is generally quite a bit of difference between schools that do and don’t offer a doctorate, even from the undergraduate perspective. Doctorate-granting institutions tend to have a much stronger focus on research, which has a few repercussions. First, the professors’ primary job responsibility is research at these schools, which does sometimes translate into worse (on average) teaching. On the other hand, these schools also generally have much more opportunity for undergraduates to get involved with research, which can be a very rewarding experience. It really comes down to personal preference and what you hope to get out of a school. Personally, I value undergraduate research quite a bit, so for me, I would recommend the doctorate-granting universities for most people. Not everyone would agree, though.
There’s no clear answer to this question as you never run into people who have sampled both on a broad basis. Some schools that offer PhDs have a reputation for solid undergraduate instruction. Some that don’t have graduate programs, still, for what ever reason, also don’t have great instruction. It’s certainly true though that the top schools that don’t offer doctorates, Harvey-Mudd, Olin, Cal Poly, Rose-Hulman and the service academies, produce top quality engineers that can and do get into top graduate programs if they choose that path. It’s up to the individual student to sort out what schools are the best fits for them, irrespective of the graduate school status. My son who only applied to schools with strong reputations for early, high quality, hands on education, ended up at a school without a PhD program, but all of the rest of his schools he applied to had doctoral programs.