If this was on a test, Sen. Elizabeth Warren would get an F. Her plan to “make college affordable” isn’t just a bad plan, it’s as if she didn’t understand the question.

To truly make college affordable, we have to lower the cost of going to college. Her plan doesn’t do that; it merely finds someone else (read: government) to pay the exorbitantly high tab.

“This week, progressive leader Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) laid out policies to improve college affordability, including making states maintain a minimum level of investment in higher education and pouring more federal dollars into aid programs,” the Washington Post reported. “Some of Warren’s ideas, such as forcing colleges to pay up when students default on loans and simplifying the application for federal aid, are tenets of a higher education agenda introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chair of the Senate education committee.”

But none of her ideas do anything — anything — to actually reduce the cost of a college education. And that cost is simply too high. Why? Well, that part is simple, too.

First, there’s administrative bloat. The New York Times cited this factor in its recent analysis on why college costs so much.

“A major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration,” the Times said. “According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.”

It’s a myth — or worse, an outright lie — that public funding for higher education has been cut. It hasn’t.

“In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s,” the Times wrote. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.”

The biggest reason isn’t government spending cuts, but government spending hikes.

“In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education,” the Times notes.

Reason magazine’s Bart Hinkle can explain this.

“The public-policy prescription for this trend has been to throw more money at the problem, in the form of student aid,” he writes. “This is lunacy. It does nothing but encourage colleges and universities to charge even more, secure in the knowledge that student aid will rise to keep up.”

Want to see what real reform in college costs looks like? Take a look at Texas’ $10,000 degree. Responding to a challenge from then-Gov. Rick Perry, 12 Texas colleges now offer a bachelor’s degree for $10,000. Other states are following suit.

Bringing college costs down is the way to truly help students.

Getting someone else to pay the still-high costs isn’t real reform.