Originally Posted by JamesNoBrakes

The answer is always: it depends.

Many 141 are more regulated, more standardized, adhere to more religious schedule and are similar to the pace that you are expected to maintain in airline training. This is especially true when you get to the "top tier" 141 schools like ERAU, UND, etc. They don't let you "get by" if you aren't meeting the standards and push you to do so. This is often a huge shocker to Part 61 students when they get to an airline, sometimes they've never really had to maintain the standards, sometimes they don't know what they are or how to find them, and so on. This is probably the primary reason that the airlines prefer this. They want a reasonable guarantee that the person will make it through the airline training and not waste their time and money.

But it depends, because you can be a self-starter and do just fine in a Part 61 school. Some people need that extra "push" of the more standardized 141. Also, you are expected to be standardized and do everything the same regardless of who the other pilot is in 121. There can be a huge variance jumping in the cockpit with another instructor, especially in Part 61.

Some Part 61 schools will have some great old "stick and rudder" pilots, but it's imperative that they are up on the latest information, regulations, publications and so on. Sometimes this is left to the "jeppeson" or "king" syllabus, and sometimes these do ok, but they are often lagging when there is a change and they often don't offer the experience that you get from an instructor that teaches you from the source material. In other words, they insert their own material based on the source material, but if you have to find something in the source material on a checkride, you might have difficulty or not be able to find it. In my experience, the jeppeson/king/whatever training course outline/home ground-school courses are a red flag that the school is lazy and not able or willing to develop and teach their own course. Again, we'll be using Airmen Certification Standards for commercial certificates vs. OTS or there'll be a change to the ACS and it'll take jeppeson months or a year to change their course, and then for the school to change it'll take additional time, so it ends up being pretty far out of date from what is actually being used by examiners. This goes for Part 61 as well obviously, because many of those use these "commercially-developed" courses and they wait for the commercial provider to provide them an "update", rather than change their courses as the regulations/standards are updated. In Part 141, it should be to a higher standard and again, if the school is not developing their own course material, it reeks of laziness IME.

Consequently, sometimes the fast-paced 141 schools are situations where the blind is leading the blind, as in barely competent pilots then becoming instructors and only staying on for a few months before getting hired by an airline. Again, the top schools understand this and reinforce their material, standards, training and so on, but you'll still get a wide variety of 141 schools from ones that operate more like Part 61 to the top tier that operate like airline training.

It depends.

It should also be noted that while it may count for something to have graduated from a big shiny 141 university, flight time and ratings/certificates far outweigh where you were trained. Sometimes this is hard for the beginning pilot to grasp, because they see the more advanced type ratings and ATP certificate as being a "long way off" and they get sucked into paying a ton of money for a 141 university. Those 141 universities usually offer a great program, but the cost benefit is hard to justify. If free, part of an ROTC program or similar, that's when it could make sense. For most, it's a lot of money that could be spent or invested for greater benefit.