Here is a story of one student’s radical reaction–she was reportedly on full scholarship, though I don’t know how much her money situation was a factor in her choice to disappear. The article below does reference the article in the OP, though:
"In a piece titled “Why I had to escape my Ivy League life and disappear,” Kidd recounted how the school’s pressure-cooker environment led her to become increasingly ambivalent about her schoolwork. As the search for her intensified, she was trying to erase all traces of the life she knew: “I started to totally disconnect. I deleted my Facebook profile first, shut down my phone and got a prepaid number, took all of my money out of my Chase bank account and opened a new one.”
These measures were prompted by a sense of alienation from Columbia and its expectations, Kidd wrote. Since arriving in college two years ago, she ceased to be the academic all-star that she had been all of her life."