<p>The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has an excellent physics department, one of the top ten or twenty in the nation. As a public institution, I imagine that it might be especially transfer friendly towards community college graduates.</p>
<p>Your community college participates in the Illinois Articulation Initiative, which includes UIUC.</p>
<p>[Transfer</a> Counseling - Sauk Valley Community College](<a href=“http://www.svcc.edu/students/counseling/transfer.html]Transfer”>http://www.svcc.edu/students/counseling/transfer.html)</p>
<p>That webpage even includes a list of equivalent courses. You can use that list to see which SVCC courses correspond to which UIUC courses. Check out the UIUC requirements for a physics major and see if you can fulfill a good number of them with SVCC courses.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago also has an excellent physics department, but I do not know how transfer friendly they are. They do not publish their CDS, so it is not easy to see how many transfer students they accept. They have a substantial core curriculum which might make it difficult to transfer in as a junior.</p>