Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been incorporating sustainability into their curricula, which is crucial for providing students with the skills and knowledge to help societies become more sustainable. During the last 15 years, there has been increasing research on sustainability competences and the pedagogical approaches to develop them. There have been proposals on lists of competences, pedagogical approaches, their groups and their links. However, most research has focused on the perspective of educators, with limited research from the students' perspective. This paper aims to provide the students' perspective of the groups of sustainability competences, groups of pedagogical approaches, and how these connect. A survey was developed for this purpose, which was applied to participants from 17 HEIs worldwide. The responses obtained were analysed in a five-step process: Descriptive statistics, Spearman correlations, Principal Component analysis (PCA) to detect the competence and pedagogical approaches groups, correlations between the groups and regressions between the groups. The PCA analysis resulted in three competences' groups and confirmed the three pedagogical approach groups. The analyses showed differences in the competences' groups between the students' and educators' perspectives. The regression analysis groups shows how the pedagogical approach groups develop the competences' groups from the students' perspective. Developing sustainability competences requires a change in the higher educational system, where the educators' and students' perspectives need to converge so that the sustainability competence–based education model is more efficient and effective in educating the future leaders, decision-makers, educators, management and professionals.