While I'm sure I could learn a lot from understanding FORTRAN, I don't exactly want to spend my time learning it since I probably will never use it.

While the sentiment is understandably common, be very careful of falling into the trap of believing that a particular approach or technology makes everything you learn irrelevent. In fact, it could just as easily be argued that using 'irrelevent' technologies as learning tools is a benefit, because your employer won't have to tear down the crappy coding habits you learned in the language de jour before they can start building your skills back up correctly.

Saying you can't build software because your school taught you fortran (or Java, or python, or etc.) is like a carpenter saying he can't build a house because his school only taught him how to use ball-peen hammers instead of the usual claw-style hammer.

Yes, you need to be familiar with the tools people are hiring for, but that's your job to learn them -- your school's job is to make you a computer scientist, not even to make you a programmer, much less a <language X> programmer.