Stan Humphries takes stock of the first quarter of 2011:
The cumulative decline in home values since the market peak is now 29.5 percent. … Nearly three-quarters (74.5 percent) of homes in the United States lost value from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011. … A record (37.7 percent) number of homes sold in March were sold for a loss.
Mark Zandi thinks the worst is behind us. Annie Lowrey compares the housing bubble with accusations of a higher education bubble:
A house is an investment vehicle much more like silver or stock shares than it is like a degree. It can be readily bought and sold. Americans had a housing bubble not just because they bought more homes, but because they speculated on homes, snatching them up, fixing them up, and pushing them back onto the overheated market. The asset-price bubble burst when people started defaulting and stopped buying.
No such market for college degrees exists: You cannot trade your University of Phoenix B.A. for a Yale degree when you start making the big money. In the words of Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector, "College degrees have value. … But they have no inherent worth. They are secondhand testimony of something valuable—the knowledge and skills associated with a unique person."
The Dish 