What do I look for when getting a PPL at a college or local school?
There are 2 major drawbacks to getting a PPL through a college program.

1) Admissions

In the comments you mentioned Purdue University. An excellent school, but they have very high academic standards (my son was interested in going there - didn't get accepted). There may be some variation for admission to the flight school program vs other degree tracks, but you'll still have to get admitted to the university of choice.

2) Cost

When getting your PPL in conjunction with a college degree, you're going to be taking a whole lot of general education courses that don't apply to flying. To go back to your Purdue example, they will not want you parading yourself as a proud Purdue alumn, yet not have the basic education levels that people would expect from a Purdue grad (IU v Purdue sparing aside). That means you're going to be taking writing and basic math and humanities classes, none of which have anything to do with getting your PPL. Each one of those credit hours will cost you. As will your flight hours. A school like Purdue is a prestigious, Big 10 school and tuition there ain't cheap. Purdue (again, mentioned in the comments and I have some personal experience) will run somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 per year for in-state tuition. I don't know the length of their flight school program, but you could do 2.5 trips through the flight school you mentioned for that kind of money.

If you go the straight up flight school route, you're going to be paying for flying lessons and flight time and that's it. Not having gone to flight school, I don't know what the admissions criteria are, but I'd venture it's not much more than having a medical certificate and the cash to start paying. If you run out of cash, you can put your training on hold for a while.

Of course, if you're going to school to get a degree and you want to make getting your PPL part of the process, not the sole reason for being there, that's a different story as far as classes go, but you're still paying a lot for the privilege of taking flight lessons through a university.