This paper proposes a critical analysis of the NEET category. We argue that it is both too focused on individual responsibility and too homogenizing to enable the development of public policies and measures capable of responding to the needs of the most excluded youth We respond to these needs by bringing qualitative sociology of inequality to bear on the analysis. We present socio-anthropological fieldwork inspired by the ECRIS method (Olivier de Sardan 1995), a qualitative approach that has allowed us to account for the diversity of young people, especially the most marginalized, living in working-class neighborhoods of the Brussels region. Our approach generates a NEET/non-NEET typology that will help deconstruct NEET as a statistical category by identifying social situations that are both diverse and temporary; this will help us to challenge the tendency to reify young people and to hold them responsible for their own circumstances. Furthermore, our typology shows how NEET situations result from trajectories shaped by structural dynamics as well as relations and processes of inequality. These may stem from social class, experiences of migration, or the intersection of the two, and inevitably exercise an effect on both school and job market environments.