This qualitative research paper examines how overseas-educated Chinese graduates navigate the growing gap between their educational investment and labor market outcomes. Drawing on eight semi-structured interviews conducted between April and May 2026, the study employs purposive maximum-variation sampling to capture a range of national educational contexts, disciplines, and employment outcomes. All interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese by the researcher and subsequently analyzed in English. The analysis is organized around four cross-cutting themes identified through iterative thematic analysis: the collective epistemic frame of “the times are different” (时代不同了); pervasive skepticism toward the return on investment of overseas credentials; geographic recalibration as a form of individualized risk management; and bounded engagement — a pattern of refusing overwork culture without embracing passive withdrawal. These findings are interpreted through three theoretical lenses — Standing’s precariat theory, Beck’s risk society thesis, and Festinger’s social comparison theory — with employment anxiety treated as a constitutive thread running through all four themes. The paper argues that overseas-educated Chinese graduates occupy a structurally distinctive and undertheorized position: the conditions that once conferred clear advantage have been progressively devalued by credential inflation, labor market saturation, and geopolitical friction, producing new forms of transnational precarity that existing frameworks only partially capture.