Complete and utter nonsense to equate ATPL with a degree. It is a practical 12 month blue -collar training course, albeit a very stringent and extensive one but one restricted to knowledge of facts and demonstration of prowess.
A degree is (usually) a three year course involving by definition a thesis which requires individual and original research into producing a paper that attempts to prove or justify a proposition by application of such research and logic. An ATPL bears no resemblance to this whatsoever.
I daresay the CAA will offer you "degree status" for an ATPL these days, and if, as stated above, automatically give you a 2:1 for it regardless of your exam results I think that merely demonstrates the pathetically weak and artificial standard the degree has reached in our society ever since Labour "governments" decided everyone ought to have one regardless of ability and relabelled all the Technical Colleges and Polys "universities" and relabelled HNDs and HNCs "degrees" and handed them out like crisp packets. Clearly not all are like this, but the vast majority are.
This fetish for a degree is neither useful nor helpful and although the majority of "degree" students could no more achieve an ATPL than swim to the moon there seem to be many pilots who hanker for the "cachet" of this bauble of academia, even though it is now more akin to a christmas-cracker gee-gaw than a true accolade.
Get over it, if you've got an ATPL that is truly something to be proud of, but don't kid yourself that you've done any original research and written a paper to prove it if you haven't!