Three years ago, Orlando's premiere newspaper demonized the Florida DREAM Act. Now, the editorial board is crumbling up the past and rewriting the future.

In an editorial published today, the Orlando Sentinel reversed its position on charging undocumented students the same tuition rate as Florida residents.

The Orlando Sentinel has a traditionally conservative track record, endorsing just three Democrats for president in its 138-year history, including Barack Obama. In 2011, the paper published an editorial that said denying "illegal immigrants" the right to in-state tuition was, "fair and fiscally prudent."

The 2011 argument was that Florida taxpayers would foot the bill for a DREAM Act. "It's unreasonable to ask Florida taxpayers...to shoulder tuition costs for illegal immigrants," the editorial board wrote in 2011. The Orlando Sentinel also argued that the bill introduced in the state senate would benefit undocumented students from other states, which is not accurate as the law states that students must have resided in Florida for three years. Still, the Orlando Sentinel wrote that, "an illegal immigrant from Mexico would pay less than a legal resident from Mississippi."

But now, the paper has changed its mind (and its rhetoric) about the fiscal affects of recognizing the right of all youth who attend Florida public schools to attend Florida public universities at equal cost, undocumented or not.

"In the past, we have opposed in-state tuition at public colleges and universities for undocumented immigrants," the 2014 editorial board wrote today, "But we've come to believe that keeping higher education more expensive, and thus less accessible, to these students is not just bad for them; it's bad for Florida."

And bad from a fiscal perspective, the paper added. Before taxpayers were pitied for the burden of the bill and today the paper argued that Florida residents are cheated by not receiving the full benefit of an investment in undocumented students' basic public education.

So far the paper's flip has flopped—at least among conservative readers, according to the comment section, which largely expressed the Orlando Sentinel's 2011 sentiments. Yet the perspective shift may open a debate that transcends party lines. 

In 2010, the U.S. Senate blocked a national DREAM Act from being signed into law by President Obama. Although 14 states have accepted versions of the legislation, Florida has consistently shot down efforts to pass a state-wide DREAM Act.