So, are we? Is paying $60,000 a year to learn torts, tax, and civil procedure really a great deal after all? I don't think there's neat yes or no answer to that question. But I do think law school critics need to take Simkovic and McIntyre's conclusions seriously.

But before we get into precisely why, let's talk a bit about what went into this study. Using Census data dating back to 1996, the paper compares the earnings of law school graduates -- mind you, not just practicing lawyers, but anyone with a J.D. -- at all stages of their careers to the earnings of bachelor's degree holders, while accounting for factors like academic performance, race, socio-economic background, their chance of unemployment, and gender. The comparison comes out looking like this.

So on average, J.D.'s have traditionally earned about $53,000 more per year than similar college-educated workers. This should shock nobody. Using some standard accounting techniques, Simkovic and McIntyre estimate that pay bump is worth about $990,000 over a lifetime, far more than the cost of tuition at any law school.

But the post-recession critique against law schools has never been about the fate of the average J.D. Rather, the concern is about the least successful grads, the ones who find themselves jobless after commencement, or toiling at legal temp work. But Simkovic and McIntyre don't just find that law grads fare better on average. Rather, they fare better all over the salary spectrum. The paper calculates that a worker at the 25th percentile of law grads makes about $17,000 more per year than a worker at the 25th percentile of earners with just a bachelor's. The median law J.D. makes $32,000-a-year more than the median B.A.

That, in turn, would make a law degree a very good investment. Assuming tuition costs $60,000 a year (the average is closer to $30,000), you can think of a J.D. as a bond that pays off about 8 percent to 10 percent for the median earner. Stocks, by comparison, pay off about 6.8 percent a year, traditionally. (Important note: If a male lawyer at the 25th percentile of earnings pays average tuition, the paper says they're still beating stocks).

Of course, everyone knows lawyers had a great run until the financial crash. What about today's young esquires? While legal salaries have tumbled and unemployment has risen, the paper argues, based on data from the class of 2008, that lawyers seem to have essentially maintained their advantage over their less educated peers. In fact, as the economy soured, their earnings premium seemed to rise.

The economy has been terrible for everyone. But it may have been better if you had a law degree to keep you afloat.

As we all learned thanks to a certain Excel error, it's a bit foolish to put too much stock in a single academic paper, especially one that hasn't yet been subjected to a thorough vetting. That said, having scoured through it -- and having asked the Hamilton Project's Adam Looney, who has done similar work on college graduates, for a second opinion -- Simkovic and McIntyre's paper seems to be both based on a reasonable set of economic assumptions and a very by-the-book interpretation of their numbers.*