My uninformed guess is that she won't need a VPN for what she wants to do - perhaps you can get somebody to test the site of the courses yourself. Will the courses involve much reliance on a VPN? Are they about accounting procedures or something, or will it involve, say, Internet research on subjects that might be, um, questionable? You don't need a VPN for everything, I only use mine when I need it, if I can figure out how to use it. And I have a friend who is savvy on the subject and says most of the complaints he hears about VPNs are about ExpressVPN specifically - there are plenty of others.

@vagabond48": "college summer semester courses ONLINE"

Between the lines, I read your OP as basically asking whether investing to the advertised 100M service will enable solid VPN connectivity or not, for the specific 3 month duration.

There is no good answer to that. Any commercial VPN service may be interrupted in China without advance notice.

Based on my experience in rural Yunnan, 4G mobile (China Mobile since China Unicom does not have service there), works well enough to watch Youtube quality videos, as long as the data subscription is big enough.

Unless you have already chosen the specific course provider, your best option would be to choose one that works without VPN, and that I think is easy to confirm if your wife is already with her family in China.

I assume this to also depend on the field of study. I can think of number of topics that would be considered questionable in China, and if some western colleges provide such education online, the entire online service of such colleges is probably

banned in China.

@Ishmael: "complaints he hears about VPNs are about Express"

Express is probably one of the more popular providers, so naturally there are more complaints about it than some others with smaller userbase.

Whether it works without VPN or not, depends completely on the specific course. Some courses may be published in platforms that are banned in China because they also allow questionable content.

In western countries at least I would include in the evaluation of a service provider, whether they are professional enough to have their own domain name through which they do business.

In China that is of course very different, since everything is done in big platforms like Alibaba or WeChat.

@Jan Jal: popularity of Express - well, yes, that might explain the number of complaints.

Buy an HK sim card, if the site is banned and it is imperative for her to be online

Thanks for all the replies. She got the China Comm 200M and it is a major disappointment. It may be fast in China but it doesn't compare to my 60M speed back in the states when I access overseas websites. With or without ExpressVPN, she could only access some of her US college website links she needed so I'll be cancelling her summer courses.

With my VPN I can DL an HD movie (1.5gb +) in about 15 minutes. If I DL 2 or 3 at once, time is the same.
A good VPN is required in CHina. In fact it is required anywhere.

@vagabond: bummer.

www.csmonitor.com/[...]

Internet censorship is spreading around the world. It starts with obvious crackpots like Alex Jones but the trend is to muffle and eventually silence all voices outside the suffocating dead centre.

Internet in China is the worst I've ever had.

The infamous 5-G at 300 M is on a level with dial-up from 1990's.