TinTin, i concur with you some colleges such as dartmouth, brown, rice are undergrad focused. The others such as harvard, stanford, cornell, hopkins, columbia etc, have more of an emphasis on graduate school. Whether one is “better” than the other for undergrad education is debatable (a smaller grad population does make the potential for professor attention greater, but it’s not uniform. Hopkins and some of the others with larger grad school enrollments have in fact smaller average course class sizes than rice as an example).
But given the OP wants to get a Ph.D in engineering, which was my field of study, there would be ostensible benefits in going to a research powerhouse. Professors who are at the top of their fields are at research powerhouses. Their recommendations go a long way as i know firsthand should he do research with them. Im not going to say hopkins is better than rice in undergrad, that is again debatable. But there are certainly merits to both institutions.