I’m surprised that there was lackluster response. For this kind of honor, you would think that there would be a flood of responses. I am attributing it to bad marketing.
Are you kidding? Grad students are well known to receive trivial monetary pay. Most of their pay is in honor.
[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.