How do I specify the protocol in an anchor and still use relative path?

It is always preferred on a personal website to use relative paths in anchors so that you can easily move your directory structure to a new website, but I want to make part of my website password protected (using .htaccess) and hence use https. Is there a way in an anchor's href to specify a different protocol without hard-coding the www.domain.com as well?

Example:

<a href="/student/example">Link</a>

I want to turn it into something like:

<a href="https: /student/example">Link</a>

The above obviously doesn't work. Is there any way to do it? I am trying to avoid any scripting but would appreciate a JavaScript more than PHP or ASP.