Emerging adults, who are late millennials and Gen Z members, question the worth of higher education, especially in preparation for volatile labor markets, careers, and other precarities. We analyzed emerging adults' sensemaking about this education-career-precarity mix through the constitutive lens of paradox using the applied tensional approach. We identified two main paradoxes centering around feelings of education and career security and vulnerability: (a) students' beliefs about educational attainment as leading directly to career success (golden ticket) that coexist with understandings that there are no guarantees; and (b) feelings of isolation in the self-managed career ("it's all up to me") that share space with desires for social networks but as educational products established by others and consistent with student-as-consumer and neoliberal ideologies. In demystifying these paradoxes, we advocate more-than approaches that position tensions as opportunities, incorporate both career development and critical communication pedagogy, and transcend through quality control interventions.