<p>As a physics professor at a smaller school than what you are looking for (Illinois Tech has about 2700 undergraduates and 5000 graduate students), I can give you my $0.02. Look for a strong physics program with a full year of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, and classical mechanics. A university with a Ph.D. program in physics would give your son a chance to work on funded projects alongside graduate students and thereby get very good research experience and letters of reference. Apart from that it is really a matter of fit.</p>
<p>Getting into a good graduate school is not so much about the prestige of your undergraduate institution but what you do with your undergraduate education. My university is not tops in the rankings and it is not big but we have placed physics majors in top 20 graduate programs consistently and they generally perform as good or better than students from better known schools. It is a question of the effort the student puts into his/her education. Getting into a highly selective program requires the applicant to make the initial cut, be it on Physics GRE scores or GPA – these schools have so many applications. Once in the pool, strong letters of reference and research experience become a factor.</p>