I'm an Electrical Engineer that works in IT. I've always worked at universities or utilities. I happen to understand enginerd so it gives me an advantage.
IT stuff comes more naturally to me than engineering but I prefer engineering. Each pay grade wherever I have worked for an Engineer has been roughly $8,000/year more than an IT professional with the same education and experience.
I go to work to pay for my hobbies. I don't go to work because it is "fun" and my life-long dream. Whoever came up with the "do what you like to do" is either willing to be poor, has family that can bail them out, or is just plain sadistic. You need to find whatever career that isn't dwindling that you can tolerate that allows you to live how you would like to live.
Right now, in IT, the two most promising fields are security and development. In 2-3 years security is going to hit the pooper as the "grow" part of the job is going to be done (implementing intrusion detection, vulnerability management, et cetera) and it will not be a huge build-out like most places started 5 years ago. Between outsourcing and the market being flooded with a ton of new college grads, the highest paying field (even more than database administrators) will be driven down to what network engineers get paid. And networking is a bad industry to be in these days as it can all be done remotely except plugging in the cables...
I've been a generic system administrator, a network and firewall guy, a database administrator, a storage administrator, and right now I'm an applications engineer/storage administrator. Storage is cake yet boring, it will soon be a cheap job once people realize that it doesn't take a lot to tune storage. Applications can be a lot of fun as long as you're at a place that is big enough to have its own developers. My favorite job has been being a system administrator because you literally get to touch everything. But it's stressful.
Few fields in IT has survive outsourcing as beautifully as development. Code assembling has largely been outsourced to India. However, someone has to fix their junk (problem solving). And someone has to take what the "business" needs and come up with an end product (creative end of the spectrum). There aren't any other jobs in IT that I'm aware of that a 30 year old can make $100k+/year by sitting at home in their pajamas.
