Is there a way to change the notification preferences for all students from the default using the API?

We would like to reduce the notification frequencies without having to make all the students do it.

It doesn't seem like there is a way to do it via the interface as per this post, but I wanted to check if there is a way via the notification preferences API.

According to what I am seeing on l. 91 of the NotificationPreferencesController, which has this API code, it looks like you can only update for the current user:

return render_unauthorized_action unless @user == @current_user

 But am I misunderstanding that line of code?