Newcastle
Newcastle is a city that has seen massive changes in the past 20 years and with it the city can now compete with nearly any city across the country. We were interested to know with such a large student population in the city, how their students differed in terms of career ambitions, academic achievement and actual work experience. To do this we looked at the sign up data of graduates from universities in Newcastle between the years 2009-2014 and looked to see what made them special.
Sectors
The career ambitions for graduates from Newcastle remained on the whole in line with the rest of the country. The most popular sector among graduates from across the UK was Management and this was also the case with graduates from Newcastle. While a preference for sectors like Advertising and PR, Marketing and Banking were also present in both Newcastle and national graduates.
One minor exception, where graduates who studied on Tyneside differed to the rest of the UK's graduates was a desire to pursue a career in Human Resources. Although this was the fifth most common choice among graduates from Newcastle, Human Resources was not featured in the top 5 national direction, losing out to Finance.

Degree Classification
Graduates from Newcastle's universities should be proud of their hard work. Graduates from these universities were awarded slightly more First Class degrees than the rest of the UK. According to our data, 10% of graduates from these universities received a First Class degree, while the national average remains 9.8%. As the 2.1s, graduates from Newcastle have even more reasons to be cheerful. 55% of graduates who studied on Tyneside received a 2.1, while the national average is much lower at 48.1%.
As would make sense, the amount of people receiving 2.2s and Pass marks is also much lower. 12% of graduates from Newcastle's universities received 2.2 and just 2% received a pass mark, with the national average being 17.1% and 3.8% respectively.

Work Experience
Work Experience is often seen as the second part to helping a university leaver secure a graduate job. We discovered that 15.1% of graduates from Newcastle's universities had managed to gain some work experience before they left university. However, graduates from the North East city should only be slightly concerned as the number lags behind the national average of 16.6% and just behind cities like Manchester and Leeds, both on 15.2%.
