There seems to have been a wide perception that since 2012, educational institutions have stopped paying for content. This is entirely untrue. Educational institutions are paying. They have not reduced the amount of money that they spend on purchasing licensed content. They have, rather, increased it.
What they stopped paying for, by and large, were the licenses through Access Copyright. They are a fraction of what they spent before. Most of them no longer pay for those. Overall, they are paying more than they paid before. What they do more than they did before is negotiate directly with publishers and other market intermediaries.