Between my father, my uncle, and my own life, I have a good set of examples to throw down here.
My uncle went to college to study music. Now, for many people this is not super smart but he is a type A hard worker and he knew he was going to do something with it, but he just had to follow his passion. Well, he wound up director of the music department in a college located in one of the coolest towns in the country. He makes a reasonable salary-nothing crazy- after years of poor living, has a lovely small home filled with instruments and an awesome family, loves his job, spends all his free time trail running, playing sports, networking at local coffee shops, snowboarding, etc., gets more summer time off than the average and basically loves his life and would keep it up forever if he could.
My dad went for the lucrative college degree in engineering, got a decent job, and has stuck with the same company for a long time. At 53 he's about to retire. He does not like his job- he's not super unhappy or anything but he's super excited to retire and move on to part time consulting. It pays large dollars and my family worked hard to save it so they could retire as early as possible. He doesn't regret it because they now get to live a pretty amazing life with total financial security and money to spare but he does admit he envies his brother quite a bit.
I think if I could go back in time and redo my college years I'd pick a program that was 1) reasonably interesting 2) very lucrative 3) where it would be possible after a few years to either telecommute or work at a great hourly rate part-time (eg 4 days/week) and live somewhere where I could pursue my favorite activities - which happen to be pretty low dollar beyond the equipment investments. Yay man-powered outdoor sports!
I'm working towards that kind of life but it took me way too long to realize that the lower key lifestyle and financial security mattered more to me than the actual job- beyond a certain point, anyway. I want to be a bit in the middle of my dad and my uncle's lives.
The moral of my examples is - don't just look at what you do at work... look at the really big picture. When picking career paths: what do you want a whole day to look like... a whole week... a whole year? Not just the 8 hour window or how the numbers work out.