I have the COBOL spec on my shelf.. but I refused that path. IBM hybrid codebase is seriously traumatizing. I don't know how it is in other companies though.
I've always thought that COBOL was insanely profitable too, however, I'm not seeing that in the Chicago area. I've seen hourly rates around $50 for COBOL/JCL positions, which is a lot less than other jobs.
Every large institution has an old COBOL mainframe running some mission-critical software that they can't upgrade away from.