I have a BS in Computing Science from the College of Engineering ('82) and MS in Business Computing Science from the College of Business ('84) at Texas A&M University.

At the time I went through my undergrad work all work was on mainframes. As I left graduate school, the pc's were just getting harddrives! I started as a COBOL programmer then went and taught for several years at a junior college. Teaching various programming lanugages and applications. That was where I was first heard of FoxPro. When I left teaching, I got a job as "the programmer" for my company (a local insurance company). I had to learn FoxPro 2.6 on my own along with ProMatrix development tool. I'm just now getting to learn Visual FoxPro 6.0. My company is slow to upgrade.

I think schooling is very important but it can't teach you everything. When I use to teach, I tried very hard to use realistic examples and programming assignments. I remembered too many professors who used off the wall programming assignments.

Smaller companies are not as impressed with degrees as with skills. But they often don't pay as well. Larger companies in Texas require 4 year degrees but I'm not sure how many of them are using FoxPro.