resizing photos in a college

Are you using photoshop elements?

You may be thinking of "Place as Smart Object".

A Smart Object layer contains an embedded copy of the original file. That means you can transform the smart object layer as much as you want, without affecting the original - in other words, it doesn't get cumulatively degraded as you perform repeated operations.

Scaling a pixel image will always degrade it a little - but you only get that degradation once, instead of every time you do something to it. That gives you a lot of freedom in the process.

You can edit the original embedded file by double-clicking the smart object, but that's not what you want to do in your example. In your case you would just resize the smart object layer directly without opening it. It will be rasterized at final output.