Excellent point. It’s a problem with operational definitions which plagues a lot of research.

But “scale” in this context implies economic efficiency. You can’t give every kid a full time counselor. You can write a script to send sms messages.

One question for the tech community, to what extent can advances in ai and other technology impact this question of scale/efficiency. If the student doesn’t know his counselor is a bot, maybe the nudges become more impactful.