Two-thirds of new college graduates last year had student loans to repay. The average amount: $25,520. The total amount owed in student loans nationwide is close to $1 trillion. The unemployment rate for young college graduates (ages 20-24) is over 9.1 percent, the highest on record.

Those are some of the statistics to keep in mind if you're wondering why college students in the Bay Area and elsewhere are joining the Occupy movement in increasing numbers.

"It's not surprising that they're raising concerns about how student debt is going to affect their future," says Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, an Oakland nonprofit that advocates for greater access to higher education. "And the debt keeps rising."

The reasons are not hard to find: State and university budget cuts lead to increases in tuition fees and related expenses, which in turn lead to the need to borrow more. What we wind up with, according to one of the organization's affiliated programs, the Project on Student Debt, is "widening the gap between rising college costs and what students and their parents (can) afford."

"What's been happening in the past few years is we've been moving the cost of high-quality education from the general public (in the form of public expenditures) to students and their families," says Christopher Newfield, the author of "Unmaking the Public University," a study of the University of California system.