A college list your teen and you can both actually see

Twenty schools, two browsers, no shared list

Junior year starts the same way for everyone. A teen with fourteen tabs open on a school laptop, a parent with a different fourteen on the kitchen desktop. Admissions pages, net price calculators, honors program requirements, a scholarship portal that only works if you have the direct URL. Neither list is wrong. They just never meet, so the same school gets researched twice and the one genuinely useful link — the page with the actual merit aid table — is sitting in the browser nobody has open.

By December there are twenty schools, four deadlines that are not the same date, and a recurring argument about whether anyone ever opened the net price calculator for the state school. A college list is a research project with a deadline, and research projects fall apart when the research lives in two places that never sync.

One board, one category per school

Make a board called College list and give each school its own category. Under each, save the four or five links that decide anything: admissions and requirements, the net price calculator, the program page for the actual major, the scholarship or honors application, and the deadline page. Five links per school is nothing to click through and a whole evening to rebuild from scratch.

If your family thinks in tiers, use reach, match and safety as the top-level categories and put each school in a subcategory underneath. Linksley allows one level of subcategory, which is exactly enough: tier, then school, then links. Saving is a right-click on the page or the extension popup, so you never leave the tab you are reading.

Put the deadlines on the board too

A board holds more than links. Add a checklist to each school — request the counselor letter, send scores, submit the FAFSA, hit the priority date — and it sits beside the links it belongs to instead of on a sticky note on the fridge. Checklists can repeat on a cadence, which is what you want for the monthly scholarship sweep.

Add a text block at the top for the details you keep re-deriving: the student ID, the counselor's email, the high school CEEB code, the family's FSA ID reminder. Unglamorous, and it is the information somebody looks up nine times in October.

Both of you add from your own laptop

Share the board with your teen so they can add from theirs. This matters more than it sounds. A list one parent maintains alone is a list the teen does not read; when both people can drop a link in, the board becomes the record of what has actually been looked at, and the conversation moves from remind me which schools we liked to why is this one still on the reach list.

You can share it view-only with a grandparent who is helping pay or with the school counselor, without handing over edit rights. And if you turn on the new-tab option in the extension, the list is on the page your teen opens forty times a day anyway.

One honest limit: Linksley does not track application status. It will not tell you whether the Common App went through, and there is no mobile app, so a teen who browses mostly on a phone still does the saving from a laptop. What it keeps is the twenty schools and their real links, in one place you can both open.