New York University’s “Office for Wellness Learning” offers college students an education in subjects that tend not to show up on your average college syllabus.

The office, a unit of NYU’s health center, sponsors a series of workshops throughout the year that teach students how to achieve orgasms, operate sex toys, and – as one workshop promises – “get to know your A-hole.”

The director of the wellness office, Jane Bogart, a slight 44-year-old woman who has the air of an enthusiastic high school math teacher, said her office serves as a resource for students who want to better understand their bodies.

While one might assume that most students entering college are familiar with at least the basic elements of sex, Ms. Bogart said NYU students have a lot to learn.

“They don’t know how sex works. They don’t know their body parts and what they do and where they are,” she said. “A lot of women don’t know what their vagina looks like.”

Her office, which promotes itself as the destination for “information, conversation, and self-exploration,” is here to help free of charge.

“We are concerned about the wellbeing of our students,” she said. “We are an educational institution.”

On average, about 15 to 20 students attend each of the workshops, which are run by student “peer educators” or health professionals employed by NYU. About half of the 13 listed workshops have a sexual component, while others, such as “Chew and Chill,” are focused on healthy eating.

Ms. Bogart said her office started the orgasm workshop three years ago after hearing stories of female students coming in for medical examinations because they could not climax during intercourse.

Her office, she said, debunks “myths” students have about the subject. At the orgasm workshop, students scribble questions on pieces of paper and crumble them into “snowballs, ” and toss them randomly across a conference room.

Students pick up one of the crumbled papers and read off the now anonymous questions.

The sex toy workshop, which was requested by students, offers “an opportunity to talk about anatomy and safer sex, and…pleasure,” Ms. Bogart said. She said her staff was trained for this particular workshop by the “education department” of Toys in Babeland, a sex toy company in New York City.

The “Get to Know Your A-Hole” workshop was another one organized by student request.

Ms. Bogart said she recently changed its name to “anal health and pleasure,” which she said sounds “more inviting.”

Ms. Bogart, who earned a master’s degree in health education from Teachers College, said NYU offers these workshops not because they are interested in their students’ sex lives but because they are concerned for their safety.

She said HIV rates are increasing among young people and syphilis cases are on the rise in New York City. Too many students, she said, aren’t fully aware of the risks of having sex.

Melissa Kenzig, director of the Alice! health education program at Columbia University, said universities are “more attuned to what students don’t know and more attuned to help them understand.”

Cornell’s health services center sells three brands of vibrators to students. Yale University has “Sex Week at Yale” in February, which this year featured porn star Devinn Lane taking part in a panel discussion and a Yale professor giving a speech about the history of the vibrator.

Barnard College now hosts the annual “Sexhibition,” billed as a “sex positive” fair where students play “dildo ring toss,” “enter the tent of consent,” or “sit in on Anal Sex 101,” according to the Web site of Well Woman, the college’s health center.

Ms. Kenzig said health centers at universities have “gotten better at knowing how to teach students about health.”

After all, she said, “While they’re at universities, they have the right to learn the information they want to know. They come to college to learn about things.”