Bio & C.V.
Eric Lin is an associate professor of business and chair of the Business Program at Oberlin College & Conservatory. His research is about human capital - the value that experience, credentials, and reputation carry as people move through their careers. Eric focuses on executive pay: what a job switch does to compensation, whether managers are paid as generalists or specialists, and where the gender gap in executive pay actually comes from. A second line of work, with colleagues at West Point, looks at talent in the military - who speaks up, who stays, and which early signals predict a successful career.
Prior to academia, Eric was a management consultant. Before his doctorate he spent nine years at McKinsey & Company, mostly in operations and product development, and he still consults on a limited basis. He earned his doctorate at Harvard Business School. Eric also has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s and master’s in accountancy from Case Western Reserve. He is a licensed CPA in Ohio.
At West Point, where he taught before Oberlin, he directed the courses in management, accounting, and human resource management, and built the Academy’s Hacking for Defense course - an immersive program where cadets worked on real Department of Defense problems using lean-startup methods. At Oberlin, he has taught across the business curriculum, from introduction to business and financial analysis to marketing, negotiations, and entrepreneurship.