You thought wrong. It may come as a surprise, but aviation degrees are not highly regarded in the piloting profession or the airlines. Generally people assume that you got a lot of the credit just for doing your ratings (the same ratings every other professional pilot did) and paid somebody some money to package that up with your gen-ed and wrap it in a diploma. So no the fact that your major was aviation will not help.

Your major generally makes no difference, although something like engineering will indicate some intelligence ad work ethic = more likely to successfully complete airline training.

A masters will really only help if everything else is equal between two candidates...it could be a tie breaker. A masters will not substitute for quality flight experience or quality internal connections.