CourseTrees is AI-native software that maps course catalogs and prerequisites across 156 universities, covering 840,000 courses linked by 470,000 prerequisites. Users can visualize degree plans, ask an AI assistant (Cam) for guidance, and save custom course maps, with a free tier and premium Pro subscription option.
Jason Potts argues in an economics paper that universities are platforms connecting multiple stakeholders, and that AI threatens their core function of credential verification by making it cheap to produce essays and code used for grading. However, the author notes universities had already weakened their credentialing value through grade inflation and program dilution starting around 2010.
AI models now provide personalized explanations and tutoring that were historically only available within university walls, undermining the institution's 900-year monopoly on knowledge dissemination. This shift challenges the underlying value proposition of higher education, which has long bundled content delivery, credentialing, and socialization into a single offering organized around scarce, gatekept knowledge.