Salary
Average Salary: $102,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $4,258,000
IT management covers a whole rainbow of job titles, and therefore a whole rainbow of pay grades.
On the violet-to-blue end of the color spectrum, you have IT support staffers, who take home a median wage of about $60,000 a year (source). This is a job you can get in on without a bachelor's degree or much work experience, although the pay will be low if you do ($35,000-$40,000 a year) (source). This is also a job that isn't particularly secure, given how much more tech savvy today's workforce is than the drones of your parents' generation.
In the orange-to-green area of the color spectrum, you have jobs like systems administrator. This gig generally requires a college education and knowledge of very specific and specialized technologies (Unix, anyone?), which is why the median salary closes in on $73,000 a year, and experienced sys admins can rake in a six-figure income (source).
In the red-to-yellow segment of your IT management rainbow, you have DevOps engineers, who tend to have undergraduate degrees in technical fields, along with work experience in systems administration and software development. A DevOps job will earn you something like $100,000 a year (source).
Keep in mind that the pay variation in IT management jobs can depend on the part of the country you work in (a good sys admin at a tech company in California is going to make more money than a good sys admin at a research university in Mississippi), as well as the industry you work in. For example, a systems administrator working for a bank or software company tends to make more than a systems administrator working for a public school district.
As an IT manager, you'll most likely have full-time employment with full-time perks, including insurance, retirement, and stock options. Software start-ups in the Bay Area advertise benefits like fully-stocked kitchens, catered meals, and monthly yoga retreats to prospective IT managers. Or, if you decide to work for a university, you may find that you (and your children) are blessed with partial- or full-tuition reimbursement as a perk.