Oh I forgot that's a thing in some countries. I did both of my university degrees just borrowing books needed from the library, they have to have enough copies for every student if needed.

But did you get a loan and.... pay for it in instalments?

Luckily most of my courses did not require textbooks. Though it was easy enough to get PDFs on libgen.

American way of life

Most of the time we'd end up with a group of friends where we'd each buy a different book then share among each other. Not many were spending the whole amount every semester, especially past the first year when we didn't really know any better.