Graduate school, as your son is experiencing, is very different from undergrad. One thing that students - especially students from LACs (including myself) - are sometimes shocked about is the relative distance, if you will, between them and the professors. The professors in graduate departments aren’t the same dedicated teachers and mentors that you often find at an LAC. I’m not saying that graduate professors can’t be warm and caring mentors and advisers, or that they can’t be good teachers. But there’s necessarily a shift in the relationship that they have with graduate students vs. their undergrads - there’s a bigger expectation of independence and self-management.
I know you said that your son is having some difficulties figuring out how to network and maneuver, and I am sympathetic to that (my graduate department had some weird and sometimes toxic politics, and I largely wanted to stay out of it). However…networking and political maneuvering is going to be important in any field he chooses to enter, whether he leaves academia or not. He has to be able to persuade others that he is skilled and competent (aka, “sell” himself) and he needs to be able to interact with social others in ways that will get them to like him, or at least respect him (aka, “politics”). He should not seek to transfer PhD programs because he struggles with that - because any department is going to require that.
For example, is his adviser actively hostile, or simply “not very friendly”? Openly hostile I can see avoiding, but if he’s only not very warm and fuzzy and your son needs something, he definitely needs to ask. With something like the quals question, there are other sources of information - other professors, the Director of Graduate Students, perhaps the student handbook, maybe some advanced doctoral students in the department, potentially the departmental secretary. Did he get a chance to seek out this information from any other source(s)?
Of course, departments range across the scale from ‘warm big happy family’ to ‘dysfunctional black hole of drama’, and some students need to be in one or the other. Advisers and departments also range from more nurturing and developmental all the way to expecting more independence and rewarding that with more freedom. If your son’s program is super hands-off and he needs a more hands-on program, that might be a good reason to seek a ‘transfer.’
In some departments, you do have to ‘sell’ yourself to professors to get a position in their lab, but even if you don’t have to do that, there are so many other things you need to be persuasive for - fellowship applications, grants, secondary projects, authorship on papers, presentations, conference funding, etc. Selling yourself doesn’t have to feel used-car-salesmany, though; it’s really just being confident in your skills and abilities and being able to competently describe your strengths to others.
And yes, the professors are mostly interested in research - that is their bread and butter, the activity from which all their rewards (comepensation, promotion, tenure) flow. The way to really catch a graduate professor’s eye is to excel in research.
PhD students can leave one program and begin another. We often call it ‘transferring,’ but it’s not really in the traditional sense - usually, you end up start over. As someone else mentioned, most PhD programs will take at most about a semesters’ worth of course credit from a previous program. You also need to get at least 1-2 recommendations from people in your current program.
for me, he is young and that is what this part of life is for, to figure out what you want to do. I also think he does not care for the geographic area he is in and he realizes that if he were to pursue academia, he would have to go where the jobs are and maybe that tradeoff is not worth it to him when he can also be happy using his skills in industry.