First of all I am not a pilot (yet) and therefore this is only my personal opinion. I am currently studying a law degree and taking a Cert. Ed so you can decide whether to listen to my opinion or not. However, having a degree makes a person a more attractive candidate. A degree shows commitment to study and an ability to achieve.
Your admission that you are not a pilot undermines your point, which is based on an assumption you can't back up with experience, I'm afraid. Let me clarify the real situation:
It is true that in many fields a degree may aid your chances of employment. It is equally true that in many other fields, a degree marks you out as 'overqualified' and thus reduces your chances of employment. Flying professionally fits neither of these profiles.
In aviation, only those people who are applying for ab-initio training to be paid for by someone else (or with deferred payment) are likely to be aided by a degree. This covers the Services, CTC, Oxford's APP, and a few other similar schemes. These are people with no flying experience whatsoever, being assessed by training organisations who are going to take some financial risk in taking them on. Without previous flying experience, these FTOs must rely on some other measure, and so academic qualifications, together with aptitude testing, are used as an aid to assessing potential candidates. A degree
may help here, but it will not be the deciding factor, and is thus not compulsory.
For those who are funding their own training, and thus are intending to pitch up to potential employers with a completed frozen ATPL, academic qualifications are far less important as the employer will be taking less of a risk than he would with the non-pilot. Whether your degree will make a difference on the day you turn up will depend on the prejudices of the individual doing the screening, but no airline that I know of (in UK) asks for anything greater than fairly basic academic qualifications from direct-entry pilots.
In other words, do a degree if you want to, but don't expect it to be a big factor in your chances of employment as a direct-entry pilot.
Scroggs