A common theme in the development policy discourse about education, youth and unemployment in the Arab world is that of “skills mismatch.” For over two decades, researchers and policy makers have regularly made the claim that young people in the Arab world are not gaining the skills needed for employment in the “knowledge economy” through existing educational institutions. Policy makers point to the apparent skills mismatch as both the reason for poor economic growth and unemployment, as well as evidence of the poor quality of education in the region.  The concept of skills mismatch is most pervasive in the steady stream of international educational development documents produced about education in the Arab world. At times the causal reasoning is explicit, with unemployment rates used as a proxy measure of educational quality (e.g., Brookings 2014). Yet the assumption that the quality of education is the cause of high rates of unemployment is often presented as truth with little to no empirical evidence. More troubling, is that the discussion of skills mismatch and educational systems in the region, often lacks analysis of prevailing labor force dynamics and barriers to economic development beyond, tedious, and at times orientalist, characterizations of Arab workers as slow to change in their expectations. Another glaring gap in this discourse is a failure to address the role of structural inequality, class-based social capital and the growing educational inequality that undergirds the socio-economic realities of youth in the Arab world, as it does everywhere. This paper undertakes a genealogy of the skills mismatch discourse, tracing its roots in labor economics and human capital driven theories of educational development, to its use as an explanatory framework for the failures of structural adjustment programs. Examining the discourse on Jordan in particular—and Jordanian youth and education—I show how the skills mismatch discourse is deployed by policy makers, at the national and global levels, to place the responsibility for rampant unemployment and inequality squarely on the shoulders of the local education system (teachers and educational administrators). At the same time, this policy discourse asserts that youth are responsible for finding their own solutions by innovating, being entrepreneurial, and making better choices. To assist them in this process, a plethora of “skills” providing initiatives and institutions have emerged to both address the “lack of quality education” and to deliver the promise of skills, if not stable employment, for a new generation.