His degree was (hard/hardly) earned

Question

• His degree was hard earned.

• His degree was hardly earned.

Which is right?

Answer 1

Both could be right in the right context, but they generally mean different things. In fact, they're almost opposite in their connotations.

"Hard-earned" (or "hard earned"; the hyphen isn't strictly necessary but is easier to read), means it was hard to earn the degree — the implication is that it's valuable because of the effort put into it, and that anyone else would probably have had to work hard too.

If you describe their degree as "hardly earned" (an adjectival phrase), it says nothing about the difficulty of earning the degree in general; it just means the person almost failed to earn the degree, probably because they didn't do a very good job working toward it. Similarly, if you say that they "hardly earned" the degree (a verb modified by an adverb), it means they probably did not get it because of the work they did at all, but for some other reason. (Bribes, nepotism, a terrible school, or whatever other possibilities.)

Answer 2

They're both correct; hardly-earned is more antiquated but means the same thing as hard-earned. I disagree with the answer that states that the word 'hardly' in 'hardly-earned' means the same thing as it does in, for example, the phrase 'hardly ever'. Idiomatically, hardly-earned means the same thing as hard-earned.

However, if you choose to use the phrase 'hardly earned', especially without the hyphen, you ARE likely to confuse readers unfamiliar with the idiomatic phrase who will understand instead that the degree was nearly unearned.

Edit: I can't find an explicit source, but doubters: read the quotations linked here on the right. You decide, where does the context fit 'barely earned' and where does the context match 'hard-earned'? https://www.wordnik.com/words/hardly-earned