These are rotten times to be graduating from school, undergraduate or graduate school and trying to find work. All that education, all those high-minded speeches about pursuing your dreams and inheriting the future and boom, smack into the worst economy since Tom Joad chewed the grapes of wrath.

What solace is there for students going through this particular agony, and their anxious parents? Well, some of the greatest businesses in the world were founded during dark economic times. Microsoft and FedEx were started in the depths of the mid-1970s recession. Thomas Edison founded General Electric during the slump of the late 1870s.

In some ways, recessions are ideal times to start a business. Rents are cheap, suppliers are biddable and hiring should be a cinch. Unfortunately, if what you have in mind is a more conventional career the news is not so good.