What truly makes this a language worth learning vs others

I'd ignore the "vs others" if you please, I have no idea why should you teach Perl over any other languages, and in Web-Development the choice is very usually not what academy would like it to be.
I would teach Perl in college for its linguistic virtues. The use of a syntax that allows you to say what you mean, and the whole "There's More Than One Way to Do it" philosophy. You may also hear Perl-hackers use terms like "fluent in Perl", "how to say in Perl".

Read Perl as a Natural Language for some more insights on this. It's a very unique experience, especially if you have some experience in other languages that attempted to have a natural language syntax.