3rd level approach to Science

Yep a happy medium would be great but is difficult to find in a third level course. Tallaght01 is spot on in his assessment imo.
To be honest, it's very, very difficult to strike this balance in any taught course, at degree or Masters level.

However, in a research Masters or Doctorate the balance is struck very well simply because while you research you have to do a huge amount of reading and learning in tandem. You need to read to come up with new ideas and inspiration and to help you put your results in context. So in that sense, third level education works well.

It's good to remember too that a degree isn't the end point of your education. It just means that you have sufficient knowledge to begin working and learning in your field of interest.

I know a Professor who on his retirement reflected that his only regret was that he still had so much to learn!

The IT model is great for the practicalities of a day-to-day job and that's brilliant but those courses are only equipped to give you the knowledge necessary to perform well in a certain spectrum of jobs.

The University sector has advantages too in that it covers aspects of a subject that don't necessarily relate to a particular job but are good to know nonetheless.

Some of the University courses now operate 'real-world' work placements in the final year but to be honest, a work placement is only as good as the company that you are going to work for, makes it.

Some companies just want a dogsbody, others actually strive to foster and educate the undergrad.

The other thing to note is that as I already said, the end of a degree is just the beginning of the learning so the institute you qualify from (unless it's one of the top 20 Third-level institutes in the World) doesn't really matter too much.

In a perfect world, the University and IT way of doing things would be combined in a neat package. Unfortunately, we don't have a perfect world just yet.

I think another important is that all "science" degrees do not, and should not, strive to the same goal. There should be a significant difference between the approach to teaching and the learning outcomes in a "pure" academic science degree, and the applied science degrees, especially the professional degrees, which are essentially training for a specific job.

Tallaght01 mentioned that you need the facts at hand in "the real world", but that's only true in a certain context. Yes, this is true for the the applied sciences etc; if you are training a medic, the only concern is that they can do the job of a medic, and that is their "real world" context. But I think an important point is that the real world context for someone with a science degree does not necessarily involve scientific knowledge, but scientific thinking. This is a point lost on many undergraduates; the skills in communication and critical and analytical thinking are valued in many industries outside the scientific. Yet graduates every year are disappointed because they expect to be able to get a job "doing science". You can't blame them; they were sold their degree programmes on this basis. Read any prospectus. The marketing and PR people in the universities have a lot to answer for...

In a sense I agree with the OP. I think there is there is a possibility to get quite far in a pure science degree programme primarily using rote learning with minimal understanding. Many people who use this approach will come unstuck in their final year. Unfortunately this trend is a side effect of the strain the universities are under; assessments like MCQs are just easier to manage in a large class.