Institutional report cards are increasingly being used by higher educational institutions to present academic outcomes to external audiences of prospective students and parents, as well as program and institutional evaluators. While some prospective students are served by national transparency measures most users mine information from the institutional web site, so even institutions at the bottom of the comparison spectrum need to manage their information dissemination to fulfill audience needs. An analysis of the Web-published institutional report cards and transparency reports of a representative sample, stratified by institutional type and geographic location, of 82 American higher educational institutions yielded results which influenced the development of a taxonomy for institutional report cards for higher educational institutions. 98% of institutions offered some type of transparency or data reporting related to student learning, with 89.3% offering some type of institutional report card, performance indicators, score card, dashboard, or student achievement reporting for consumers. At an average of 8.12 documents, state colleges and universities averaged the highest number of documents and webpages devoted to transparency reporting. Carnegie-class research institutions and state colleges and universities most consistently deployed a single office, typically named as an Office of Institutional Research to disseminate findings 64.7% of the time.