He could give them to a professional company, but by that time (depending on how many he wants to convert) he'd spend more money than he would buying high-end video capture equipment and doing it himself.
*edit* I had some big tapes of some public access TV shows that my friends and I made in high school. There were about 8 of them, and just transfering them to VHS would have cost me hundreds from these damn companies. I had the father of an old grammar school friend (who owns a video production company), transfer them for free The point is that I think it would cost about the same to try to get them into digital format.*edit*

Really any capture card (or video card with capture capabilities) will be able to do it, especially since VHS won't result in the highest quality video anyway. This hardware will more than likely come with software which will let you select the format the finished file will be in.

Difficulties arise when/if you want to save this video to some other medium, such as VCD or DVD. In that case you need the appropriate hardware but also software to convert it to the corect format, which will likely degrade the quality a bit more.

It really depends on what he wants to do. If he wants to simply store and view it on his PC alone, then just capture it and store it as some sort of compressed format. This is an issue of the type of card you get. Some will do hardware encoding to MPEG2 format. The downside is that if you want to edit that video, you'll need some expensive software.

I would think the main issue with doing it yourself is that you need a pretty powerfull machine to do it with, particularly if you do it often or if you do any post-capture converting of the video, and especially if you want to do any editing.

I'm sure others will have better suggestions, though, including which bits of hardware they recommend. I have an ATI Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder card which captures pretty nicely.