It's a daunting time to be entering the work force. Today's young adults - like their great-grandparents eight decades earlier - are starting careers at a time when the U.S. economy is shedding jobs at a record pace.

This newest adult generation, dubbed the Millennials, is known for its optimism and sense of personal confidence. But will those traits survive the new economic realities? Recent survey results suggest the answer is a resounding yes. Millennials are demonstrating remarkable resilience in the face of an economic crisis.

Through the first quarter of 2009, employment for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped by 5 percent. This produced the lowest employment rates for young people in nearly 40 years. And the situation isn't likely to get better soon. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that employers plan to hire 22 percent fewer graduates this spring than last, and that, so far, less than 20 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job have one.

But Millennials have adopted coping strategies to help them weather the economic maelstrom. An AP-mtvU poll found that nearly 1 in 5 undergraduates has decided to prolong education. Others have enthusiastically turned to the government and nonprofit sectors to fulfill their generation's desire to serve. Teach for America, which places graduates in low-income schools, saw a 42 percent increase in applications over 2008.

One thing Millennials are not doing is losing confidence in themselves or their government. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press found that 56 percent of Millennials were fairly satisfied with the way things were going for them financially, a significantly greater degree of optimism than aging baby boomers expressed. Two-thirds of Millennials told researchers that they approved of President Obama's handling of the economy; only 5 percent said his economic policies made things worse. Although 32 percent of undergraduates at four-year colleges told Edison Media Research that financial worries have increased the stress they're under, 75 percent of Millennials expressed confidence that Obama was doing the right things to fix the economy.

This relentless optimism and faith in collective action is typical of civic generations such as the Millennials. Judging by history, their attitudes will serve them well. Their great-grandparents, the GI Generation, learned to make do with less as they entered adulthood in the 1930s and then went on to defeat fascism in World War II and build the strongest economy the world has known. As Millennials absorb the lessons of America's greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, their determination to succeed, like that of the GI Generation, will be the source of the economic rejuvenation that in all likelihood will accompany their full entry into America's economic life.

(Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics.)