NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – Soon they will be doctors or diplomats, but right now they’re in their 20s, hopped up on hormones and cheap beer and on the prowl.

Sex and the Ivy League. It’s no different from sex on any college campus, says Natalie Krinsky, a 22-year-old Yale graduate whose recent novel, “Chloe Does Yale,” invites readers along for drunken hookups, naked parties and the purchase of adult novelties.

Krinsky should know. As an undergraduate, she wrote a popular sex column for the student-run Yale Daily News and showed that even the super smart can be downright clueless when it comes to the opposite sex.

Sure, the SATs were a snap, but why isn’t he calling you back after your date? Your computer algorithms are flawless, but how do you hide after a dance floor encounter was a bit too exciting?

These are the questions at the heart of “Chloe Does Yale.” The plot and conflict are almost nonexistent. It’s just a confused college girl and her friends moving from one mini-crisis to the next. The setting is the star.

“The allure is Yale,” Krinsky said. “Yale and Harvard and Princeton as institutions are very much revered as serious centers of academia, which they are. But there’s also the other side. And it’s exciting and fun to see that other side.”

Baring that other side is sure to get noticed. Harvard drew international attention when its students launched a sex magazine, H Bomb, last year.

And the mere suggestion that President Bush’s daughter, Barbara, may have attended a Yale naked party was enough to garner national media attention and an a $1 million reward for evidence by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

“It’s a combination of the interest in these bastions of American privilege and the taboo nature of sex,” said Elizabeth Ehrenberg, a senior at Vassar, where she is community relations director for the periodical Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex.

Chloe, Krinsky’s titular character and alter-ego, is a sex columnist who bumbles through relationships with all the panache expected of a college undergraduate. She’s definitely an overachiever (she consoles herself with a copy of “Anna Karenina”) but like the rest of her peers, she’s trying to balance that drive to succeed with her drive to have fun.

“I don’t think they have to be mutually exclusive,” said Krinsky, who now lives in New York. “You can still have a great, fun exciting youth. Look at our current and our past presidents.”

Journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe explores many of the same themes – though more seriously – in his latest novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which focuses on the sex lives of students at a fictitious North Carolina top-tier school.

“It’s sex. That makes it even more fascinating to peer into that world,” Ehrenberg said.

While Krinsky’s debut novel is decidedly sexual, don’t expect all the gory details. The prose is all in the present tense, making the reader feel as if each chapter is being rehashed over breakfast at the campus dining hall.

“What if it gets too crowded,” Chloe frets at her first naked party. “You could get pregnant just waiting in line for a beer. I’d love to see that conversation go down with my mom. No, actually, I didn’t have sex; I just went to a party where everyone was naked.”