Simon & Schuster
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
Published in July 2025
What should academics worry about? What do you worry about?
The list is long. Some candidates for worrying might be:
- An AI-driven disappearance of knowledge-work jobs for recent college graduates.
- The erosion of democratic norms and institutions.
- The politicization of research funding and the federal government’s encroachment on institutional autonomy.
- Growing inequality and wealth concentration.
- Climate change, extreme weather and the risks to campus infrastructure.
Maybe you are mostly worried about losing your higher ed job as the sector’s financial situation deteriorates.
I worry about all of these trends (and more), but what I think about most these days are babies. Or, more precisely, the lack of babies.
In After the Spike, demographers (my people) Dean Spears and Michael Geruso argue that concern about falling birth rates should not be cornered by the ideological right. Rather, those with liberal-to-progressive leanings should be worried about a future of population decline. Fertility here is measured by the total fertility rate (TFR), which is 2.1 for replacement (Mom and Dad need to be replaced, with 0.1 of wiggle room for early mortality).
Population decline?
Conversations about higher ed’s looming demographic cliff are everywhere in our communities. However, we are so focused on the declines in high school graduates in the late 2020s and 2030s that we in academia tend to lose sight of the larger story: Sometime in this century (the precise inflection point is disputed), both the U.S. and global populations will begin to decline precipitously.
Borrowing a figure from the book will help illustrate this (now definite) future. After the Spike seeks to explain this chart on a global scale by answering four questions:
- Where has global fertility slipped below replacement?
Answer: Nearly everywhere (India’s TFR is now below replacement), save a dwindling number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
- Why are women across the world having fewer than two babies and, in some places, fewer than one?
Answer: Spears and Geruso reject the expense hypothesis, arguing that the rising cost of childbearing can’t explain fertility declines because the TFR has dropped as countries have become wealthier and that wealthier places (and people) are also having fewer kids. The authors favor an opportunity cost hypothesis, arguing that parents weigh the costs of having kids against the lost opportunities for career and leisure.
- What are the potential social, economic and political consequences of rapidly declining populations?
Answer: Here, Spears and Geruso take on the antigrowth wing of the progressive left, arguing that declining populations are bad for the well-being of people and the planet. They reject environmental arguments against fertility, pointing out that carbon emissions are a function of political and economic choices, not population size. Ultimately, fewer people mean that less gets produced, consumed and created.
- What, if anything, can countries do to bring TFR back up to replacement levels?
Answer: The authors of After the Spike are skeptical that governments can do much to influence TFR. For parents and potential parents, the decision to have a baby (or another baby) has long-term, life-changing consequences. Any incentives that governments may provide, ranging from baby bonuses to subsidized childcare, are welcome—but still too short-term to significantly impact the TFR.
How might higher education leaders think about and then address the risk of long-term population decline?
One approach would be to look close to home. Do we know the gap between the desired and actual births of faculty and staff at our institutions? Do we know what resources, supports and policies might help our community members close that gap?
Universities can serve as living laboratories to develop policies and systems that enable families to achieve their desired fertility. We can be models.
We can make research-informed employment and benefit choices related to fertility and then work to disseminate that research and those practices to other organizational contexts.
Every baby not born is one fewer future college student. Universities have a long-term stake in the long-term fertility story.
Reading and talking about After the Spike on our campuses is one way to jump-start that conversation.
What are you reading?
