A study was conducted at Golden West College (GWC) in California to analyze the relationship between first-time students' participation in the college's assessment and orientation programs and their fall-to-spring persistence at the college. The study sample consisted of fall 1991 students who had declared either transfer, degree, or certificate as their educational goal (N=2,670). Primary comparisons were made between students who participated in neither assessment nor orientation (N=734), students who participated in one of these matriculation components (N=671), and students who participated in both of them (N=1,265). The major findings were that participation in either assessment or orientation was found to be consistently associated with higher persistence rates than was participation in neither component and that participation in both components was related to greater persistence than participation in only one component. These trends held across the range of units enrolled, for both genders, as well as for all ethnic and primary language categories; hence, persistence was apparently independent of these factors. Twenty-nine data tables/graphs are appended, making up more than half the report. (MAB)