You're very welcome, Dan.
A cube with 1000^3 segments made editable, placed into a Cloner 4x1x4 Grid and made editable again can quickly get over 4GB. Perhaps your student can test it. In that way, it can be seen if the student's file is perhaps damaged if the cube test file works.
I can say that 2024 has vast improvements to work with more load.
I hope your student can open it on another machine and split the file, perhaps place some parts in a new file and use XRef to overcome an OS limitation.
I guess you might share this observation: when people are new to 3D, there is often the idea to overdo it, and it takes a while to get a "feel" for the sweet spot.
My best wishes for you and your students.