A recent study estimated that getting a college degree is worth about a half-million dollars over the course of a graduate’s lifetime. On the surface, that presents an open-and-shut case that college is worth the time and money involved. That’s the conclusion reached in a New York Times column by Dave Leonhardt, who wrote, “Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close.”

Leonhardt bolsters his case with data from the Economic Policy Institute: “Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.”