You are contradicting yourself. You say that there are not many jobs available for COBOL programmers and you say that your company has had difficulty finding COBOL programmers below the age of 50. An important question is how much competition there is for the .Net positions. If there are many college students learning .Net and very few learning COBOL then the students that have learned COBOL might have no problem getting a job whereas there would be a lot of competition for languages that are taught more commonly. I agree that it is important to learn languages such as C++ and Java. Note that .Net is not a language.
