Recent college grads looking for jobs right now certainly have their work cut out for them. The unemployment rate among people in their twenties is now nearly 20 percent. The other day a young jobseeker told me that even the good jobs waiting tables have all been snatched up, so that old standby of a fallback is no longer a sure thing either.

Applications to grad school are way up, often as a strategy for postponing entering the work force until the economy improves. Our 21-year-old, a rising college senior, has started mentioning how cool it would be to have a PhD. (We’re thinking how cool it would be to be done with paying for higher education for a while.) Even the grown-ups seem to be adopting that strategy. A single mom I know with four young sons was recently laid off from her job and went straight back to school to get her masters the following week.

Back in the recession of 1991, frugal spending was the highly touted solution to the economic downturn. Ken Kurson, in his article in this month’s Esquire titled “Saving Money Won’t Save You,” reminds us of the Tightwad Gazette approach to living on less and also writes ‘Too many people ignore the other solution — Increasing revenue.’ Most of Kurson’s article, however, was about  a 20-year-old entrepreneur who had somehow wriggled his way into an appointment to show him his version of the better mousetrap, a dorm-room seating solution called the Slouchback.

I predict we’ll see a large wave of 20-something entrepreneurs in the next few years, partly because when you’re making nothing, spending less is not much of an option. But also because Gen Y is wired from birth to believe in their ability to start and run a company. Many of our large corporate clients complain, in fact, about Gen  Y’s unwillingness to pay their dues like the generations before, and their assumed presumption that they could take over from the CEO right this second.

Launching a startup and running it successfully requires a mindset that’s not easily swayed by reality. Most entrepreneurs tend to be extraordinarily optimistic people, even in the face of crippled cash flow, client budget cuts and other inconvenient business developments. They have to be, or they would never be able to weather the emotional ups and downs that are part of the entrepreneurial life.

Gen Y is often characterized as having been raised with helmets on. Their parents, mostly Boomers, are said to have brought an entirely new level of intensity to parenting, and that as a result, Gen Y kids have been protected from the experience of losing, insulated with an amazingly high sense of self worth, and bolstered with the belief that they can achieve anything they can imagine.

I’d say that happens to be a perfect recipe for creating an entrepreneur. Judith Warner, in her New York Times Magazine article titled “The Why-Worry Generation” asks “Did Boomer parents actually do something right?” She points out that many Gen Y kids have seen their parents deal with layoffs or at the very least, fear of layoffs, so they don’t view the corporate life as the sure thing earlier generations once did. More importantly, she suggests that “their sense of entitlement and lack of  humility” may actually make them well adapted to cope with adversity. Their unstoppable optimism and high self regard provides them with unique resilience.

If you’ve got both resilience and optimism, then maybe all you need to be an entrepreneur is a big idea. Fortunately, Gen Y seems to be good at that those, too.