Austin, Tex.

WILL STOVALL, a history student in his fifth and final year as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, returned from studying in Mexico last fall determined to go to law school. In service of this goal, he resolved to work harder, which meant he would have little chance to see old friends or to acquire new ones, and that, in turn, seemed to require a very particular kind of domestic arrangement.

“My thinking was that I wouldn’t have time to make a social life, so I needed to have people around,” said Mr. Stovall, who looks as if he has spent much of his life on the verge of hoisting a spinnaker. Instead of renting an apartment, the custom for most seniors, he moved into French House, one of 15 cooperative living facilities run by students on the university’s campus. “People shudder when I say this,” he said, “but a co-op is very much like a frat, without all the fratty people.”

After a fallow period in the 1980’s and much of the 90’s, residential co-ops, where students cook and clean for themselves, have undergone a renaissance at the University of Texas and on other campuses across the country. About 10,000 students are living in co-ops in the United States and Canada, said Jim Jones, former executive director of the North American Students of Cooperation and a historian of trends in communal living. That figure is roughly as high as it was during the two liveliest periods of the co-op movement: the late 1940’s, when cooperative housing emerged as a cost-efficient alternative to dormitory living for returning G.I.’s, and the late 1960’s, when the culture of shared ownership embodied the era’s anti-authoritarian sensibilities.

Image Students at Pearl Street socialize poolside, shedding hippie reputation of co-ops at the University of Texas in Austin. Credit... Wyatt McSpadden for The New York Times

The current interest in co-ops stems in part from the economic imperative that rising housing costs have wrought. But more than anything else, students suggest, it has grown up in reaction to the alienating aspects of modern campus life, where the increased presence of technology, while enabling certain kinds of connection, has had a hand in limiting others.