Is it worth it what you paid to go to Purdue? To me, it wasn't. I got the same credentials you did while doing it part 61 for a hell of a lot cheaper. What is the residual value of a preferrential hiring position for a 25K job? Is it 100K in debt? That's up to the individual to determine.
Getting your credentials at a university has other advantages. To stay with the Purdue example, you can get a world-class engineering or business degree while also getting pilot credentials. Tuition at Purdue this year is $9900/year, which is only $2k more than it was when I was a student in the 90s. An additional $38k gets you PPL, IR, CPL, CFI, CFII, MEL, and a Phenom Type rating. The school is staffed almost entirely by retired senior captains, corporate chiefs, air traffic controllers, and airline executives. My commercial ground was taught by an SR71 pilot; in turbine systems class I got to fast taxi a 727 with my professor, who was the former chief of maint. for Delta (I think it was Delta). I got to participate in some of the early research into plant-based jet fuels. I wasn't even in the Aviation school, I was an engineering student. The aviation students got even more opportunities.
If you were a chief pilot and needed to staff your department with young people who may one day take over your position, which is far more business than flying, would you choose someone with a legitimate business degree, who already had turbine time, or would you choose someone from the local FBO? The average starting salaries for Purdue engineering and business grads are often multiples of a new CFI, some fields coming close to the $78k spent on school (room and board not included, because those expenses exist whether you go to school or not). For me, it was well worth it. I didn't choose to fly as a career, I do it on the side. If I had chosen that route, I would have been eminently more employable.
I am not sure of the validity of either the 1000 or 1500 hr rules or the relative merit of the 141 process, but to dismiss the real benefits of a university aviation education simply because that university is associated with a 141 system is disingenuous (IMO...and we all know about those).