Nowadays, it is of vital importance to make students aware of the problems that can be generated by the deterioration of the environment. The purpose of this study is to establish a suitable mechanism to predict behavior and to investigate the actions that most motivate students to participate in sustainability activities both on and off campus. To achieve this objective, a sample of 1446 students from nine Latin American universities is analyzed using the CHAID algorithm as a segmentation technique. In this way, the aim is to identify the most relevant actions that allow students to be segmented according to their motivations. From a theoretical point of view, the effectiveness of this segmentation technique in the context of environmental sustainability is confirmed, and from a practical point of view, university managers are provided with guidelines on the most effective measures to motivate students to develop pro‐environmental behavior.