[throwawayarnty]

Academia beyond postdoc is so competitive that even being in top 5 school is not enough information to decide whether it is a good idea.

Even within Harvard, the percentage of postdocs getting faculty positions is low.

One needs to calculate essentially how likely you will get a top publication in that lab.

The arithmetic is something like for a research group, what is the average number of top publications per year per postdoc. Many top labs at Harvard don’t do well with this metric because they have like 20 postdocs and 1 top paper a year.

Another metric is what fraction of postdocs end up in good faculty jobs.