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, including 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 what 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, holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and holds a bachelor’s and master’s in accountancy from Case Western Reserve. He is a licensed CPA in Ohio and serves as a faculty member of the Oberlin College Board of Trustees Budget and Finance Committee.
At West Point, where he taught before Oberlin, he directed the courses in management, accounting, and human resource management, and he built the Academy’s Hacking for Defense course, an immersive program in which cadet teams worked 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.
Eric founded and chairs Oberlin’s Business Program. He built it from a single-faculty launch into one of the college’s fastest-growing majors; in its first year as a full major it reached the top 20 by enrollment and doubled its teaching capacity. He designed the curriculum and recruited the faculty, building a program that connects business skills to a liberal-arts education. His teaching leans on the case method and on learning by doing, so students practice making real operating decisions instead of only reading about them.