alt Hacker Newsare you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .
In 2013, I graduated from a top 3 school in my field of engineering. I was getting paid $23 000/year as a PhD student.
I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.