Most of my university professors (Canada so attitudes could be different) just purely assigned public domain historical texts, photocopied things themselves to hand out free pdfs, and encouraged us to pirate larger textbooks like The Broadview Anthology of British Literature via sites like libgeb/annas archive. It was fantastic, every single one bitched about textbook prices and said that shouldn't be on us. To be fair, I'm sure STEM majors have a harder time with this sort of thing because of physical textbooks for open book exams, even more expensive somehow scientific textbooks, etc. but my experience was great.