The thing about brilliant physicists and engineers is that they're really good at math. Of course they're going to take the higher paying job! If there are other "more important projects," then perhaps these projects need pay rates that are competitive with Wall Street.

Seriously. He needs to find something physical he enjoys and pursue it. Education is not limited to books and classes. Young Gabriel needs to learn how to train everyday, to push himself, to take care of his body, to win with modesty, and to lose with dignity.

Hiring an EE and going straight to PCB design and fab is not a cheap proposition. You instead should focus on the intellectual property and in building a prototype/demo unit. This can be done on any number of FPGA development boards for a relatively low price. Depending on your specific requirements, you would spend anywhere from $200 to $6000 on one of these boards.

In particular:

1) Learn about FPGA's. Learn how to program in Verilog or VHDL or find a Computer Engineering grad student to help you with this.
2) Get an account on opencores.org. Identify the cores you can use so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. The USB core comes to mind.
3) Find an inexpensive FPGA development board that could host your prototype. Xilinx and Altera (the two leading FPGA manufacturers) sell these and offer a "web kit" version of their software for free. The Xilinx Spartan 3A Video Starter Kit may work for you.

I work for a very large high technology company that has instituted a flex-time policy for about 10,000 people in California and Colorado. An employee may work traditional, 9/80, or 4/10 (4 ten hour days/week). Almost everyone from interns to senior management is on 9/80. The office is a ghost town on those "off-Fridays." I barely notice the extra hour per day and still have plenty of time for life outside of work. The three day weekends are priceless, whether you want to shop at the mall on an uncrowded day or go on a 3-day ski weekend. Even on the off-Fridays we're asked to work, management usually offers hour-for-hour vacation time reimbursement.

The downside of the 9/80 (besides the resentment of my friends at other tech companies) is that you often waste your off-Friday waiting for your wife, buddies, or whoever to get off work before you can leave for weekend trips. I often lament that the only other people with off-Fridays are my co-workers.

US public schools are facing gigantic budget shortages (even the wealthy ones here in SF Bay area) for the next two years due to reduced tax income and your school wants to buy each student a pricey laptop? Save the money for something else; your students probably have computers at home. If they don't, why not start a home PC subsidy for less advantaged students who qualify? That way all students may have access to a computer but the school doesn't have to deal with the associated IT burden. Think of it as subsidized school lunch for the next generation.