Project Opportunity is a longitudinal demonstration guidance project that seeks to identify and encourage academically talented students to complete high school and continue their education, generally at a college or a vocational/technical institution. Project Opportunity operates at 11 locations in the South. A report, the first of two comprising this document, summarizes an analysis of the persistence of 712 Project Opportunity students who entered four-year colleges in 1970, 1971, and 1972. Some 81 percent completed the first year, and about 70 percent completed two years of college. Of the student participants in the program, some 78 percent are black and nearly half come from families where the total family annual income is less than $6,000. The project has seen some 1,600 students in four successive groups graduate from high school and over three-quarters of them have continued with some form of post-secondary education. The second report presents data showing that the median proportion of black students among the freshman classes at predominantly white institutions in the South in 1972-73 was 6 percnt, that the proportion of black freshmen at public institutions is double that found in private institutions, and that 60 percent of the black students at all types of predominantly white institutions complete their freshman year with over a C average. (Author/JM)