This study examined the impacts of institutional and instructional stressors on college students' intentional persistence. The study used a causal-comparative design with 219 students (188 developmental and 31 nondevelopmental) who had persisted beyond freshman and developmental curricula at Grambling State University (Louisiana). Of these students 48 were classified as unintentional persisters, 47 as intentional persisters, and 124 as socially or academically integrated (but not affiliated); also of the 219 students, 98 were co-integrated and 121 malintegrated. Participants were exposed to several endemic institutional risk factors that were considered to be "a web of causal stressors." The study examined the effects of six theoretical constructs, three exogenous latent variables (students' background characteristics, the institutional environmental system, and the instructional environmental system), and three endogenous latent variables (effective use of systems approach/principles in classroom by instructors, co-integration, and persistence). Findings indicated that: (1) 93 percent of students with the highest propensity for co-integration were co-integrated and all students at high risk for malintegration actually malintegrated; (2) 97 percent of co-integratable students were properly classified as either co-integrated or malintegrated; (3) 30 percent of students with the tendency for intentional persistence were improperly classified as unintentional persisters; and (4) the systems design and co-integration scales had the greatest impacts on intentional persistence. (Contains 73 references.) (DB)