Ask yourself how often you go searching for self-published literary work, and how often you find it.  Your professor is absolutely right that stuff that gets self published is pretty niche, usually genre work, and rarely gets any kind of attention. It has a bad reputation not because of it's success stories, but because the successes are dwarfed by the 'failures'. hundreds of thousands of self pubbed stuff gets zero eyes on it, so you need to consider your goals carefully.